Exploring General Relativity on a Lab Bench

[wolram]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720134239.htmI think this belongs in beyond, if not please move .

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2009) — Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict such astronomical observations as the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Now, however, it may soon be possible to study the effects of general relativity in bench-top laboratory experiments.

 

[marcus]

That's an interesting article. Thanks for flagging it for us.
People at Lawrence Berkeley Lab have prepared special optical materials that bend light in ways that resemble how an intense gravitational field would. Like having a solid state black hole analog. Much safer to handle and to examine up close than a real black hole would be (if one could ever obtain one.)

 

[humanino]

I think this belongs in beyond, if not please move .

It does not. A condensed matter system is described by the same mathematical equation as an astrophysical one. There is nothing beyond the standard model here.