We're used to thinking of gravity in the context of large masses – the whirl of planets, the inexorable pull of a black hole.
But everything with mass, no matter how small, exerts a gravitational pull on everything else.
There is, however, an expected frontier where the classical dynamics described so elegantly by general relativity must somehow reconcile with the beautiful chaos of quantum mechanics.
How do we find this frontier? By attempting to measure gravitational interactions on smaller and smaller scales, always refining the techniques so that one day, hopefully, we can glimpse what lies therein.
And now, physicists led by Shan-Qing Yang of Sun Yat-sen University in China have announced a new milestone – a measurement of the gravitational attraction between the smallest pair of masses yet, two silicon wafers each weighing a mere 7.6 milligrams.
It is, they write in a paper published in Nature Communications, "a significant step toward bridging the classical and quantum regimes of gravitation."
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