A group of scientists has shown that an object in “the quantum phase of free fall” is affected by gravity. If this sounds obvious, that’s not at all true—it’s actually really hard to link quantum phenomena in general to classical physics in concrete ways. In fact, this new observation comes many decades after it was first theorized by Albert Einstein. The finding is therefore an important step toward understanding how quantum and classical physics, two very different branches of the field, might one day be unified.
The scientists’ research appears now in an article in the journal Science Advances, from a team that includes 95-year-old Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose. In the intro, the authors explain how gravity and the idea of the free fall are so vital to the handshake zone between quantum mechanics and general relativity: “Einstein used the geometry of space-time to describe gravity and free fall. [O]ne should be able to describe nature from different frames of reference. [T]he principle of equivalence has guided our understanding of gravitation for over a century.”
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