An international team including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Sir Roger Penrose has observed a long-predicted effect of gravity on a falling quantum object for the first time. The result shows that a fundamental principle at the heart of Einstein's theory of gravity remains consistent with the behavior of matter in the quantum world. The study, led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Ulm and the University of Oxford, was published today (Sept. 2) in Science Advances.
For more than a century, physicists have relied on two extraordinarily successful descriptions of nature. Quantum mechanics explains the strange behavior of atoms and other tiny objects. Einstein's theory of gravity explains how objects fall and how gravity shapes the universe. Yet physicists still do not fully understand how the two fit together.
Now, an international team has performed an experiment that probes the point where they meet. In the study, the researchers observed a distinctive change in the quantum properties of atoms as they fell under gravity. Crucially, the effect they measured is the same one predicted when Einstein's equivalence principle, a cornerstone of his theory of gravity, is applied to a quantum object.
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