Gravity Can Push Away — A Quantum Experiment ⚡ экспресс
Gravity always attracts, but scientists have devised an experiment where quantum superposition (an object in two places at once) leads to gravitational repulsion. Such a trick is impossible without quantum interference and would prove gravity's quantum nature. What else is hiding in the familiar world?
Gravity always pulls — an apple falls down, planets orbit in circles. But by placing a source of gravity in two places at once, you can get the opposite. Physicists have proposed an experiment: a massive body is put into a quantum state, smeared across space like a cloud. Then a tiny particle is shot into that cloud.
In classical physics, the particle would be attracted to each position of the mass and travel along an average path. But after a special selection of the measurement outcomes of the source, two versions of gravity interfere.
Unlike gravitational waves, this phenomenon requires a quantum description. Ideas of quantum gravity, which call for a revision of the foundations of physics, were developed by scientists such as John Archibald Wheeler, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Hawking.
The big surprise: repulsion occurs only in half the cases when you select the right outcome. And the source mass must be smaller than a grain of sand, but huge by the microworld's standards. Such an experiment is feasible right now and will for the first time let us 'feel' the quantum nature of spacetime.
🎯 Quantum gravity was considered almost elusive: the forces are so weak that at the micro level they can't be measured. This experiment proves otherwise.
🎬 Science fiction writers have long dreamed of antigravity: Asimov created it with quantum converters. Now scientists propose a real quantum trick to see repulsion in the lab for the first time.