Quantum gravity has long baffled scientists. Now, a breakthrough discovery could change physics forever
PHYSICS
What happens inside a black hole? How did the Big Bang begin? How do forces unite to form the cosmos? Scientists could be closer than ever to answering humanity’s biggest questions because they’ve finally found a way to measure gravity in the quantum world.
Using a new technique, a team from the UK, the Netherlands and Italy detected a weak gravitational pull on a tiny particle. So tiny was the particle, in fact, that it’s the smallest mass at which gravitational signals have ever been recorded.
The technique involved levitating the particle in extremely cold temperatures, close to absolute zero (about -273°C/-459°F). By using magnets and superconducting devices (known as ‘traps’), they then isolated the particle’s vibration, which enabled them to measure the pull of gravity on it.
That pull came in at just 30 attonewtons (aN). One aN is one quintillionth (1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000) of a Newton (N). The gravitational force of an apple sitting on a table is roughly 1N – making the pull that the scientists measured even smaller than the pull of a single bacterium on a table’s surface.
Previously, scientists were baffled as to how gravity worked at the microscopic level, since particles and forces at this scale interact differently than at larger ‘macro’ scales. Even Einstein was baffled by it: in his theory of Genera
