Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

We went to the Baron Roland von Eötvös University to see the church and found it to be closed and under construction, as you can see on the right side of the photo above.

However, this is a place named for a well-known physicist from the 19th and early 20th century. This university is both the oldest (founded in 1635) and largest university in Hungary (currently about 28,000 students). It was named for Eötvös in 1950.



When I was in graduate school, low those many years ago, there was a faculty member who was interested in a minor detail of Eötvös famous experiments to determine if inertial and gravitational mass were equivalent (and they are to great precision). It seems that Eötvös used all sorts of materials for the masses in his torsion pendulum experiments and there was some suggestion in the data that perhaps there is a material dependence to the whole thing. In the '70's, there were some folks who got all excited and started repeating the experiments with modern equipment to see if it was real (it is not). This gave rise to much heated speculation about the possibility of a 5th force. This never panned out, but it was indeed a hot topic for a short while.

Interestingly, there are Hungarians still looking, and apparently finding, evidence of some sort of 5th force. In a 2016 article in Nature, Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported evidence of a new force mediated by a boson with a mass 34 times that of the electron.

Now, in new research using helium rather than the beryllium used in the earlier experiment, the same group is reporting again evidence of an anomaly that is consistent with a boson of the same mass.

 Perhaps they are right, I don't know. But I do know that they just don't quit looking. Good on them!