A 15-year-old Indian schoolboy in the UK has been awarded the prestigious Institute of Physics Prize for conducting an experiment which verified the effect of Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Pratap Singh, a student at The Perse School, Cambridge, has won the 500 pounds Institute of Physics (IOP) prize at the Big Bang Fair held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. More than 200 UK students aged 11-18 competed in the finals, demonstrating their projects to thousands of visitors. Singh used two Geiger-Muller tubes to detect cosmic-ray muons, which should not reach the Earth in detectable numbers unless time dilation occurs. He created a mathematical model for their arrival rate with and without time dilation, and using a Raspberry Pi and some statistical analysis, showed that they follow the model predicted by Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity.

The prize was among several awarded in the finals of the National Science and Engineering Competition at the fair. An article that Singh wrote about his experiment will be published in Physics Education, a journal published by the IOP.

By Premji