Pendulum Swinging Nonstop for Five Days ⚡ экспресс
Physicists built a superconducting oscillator (a shaker) weighing a few milligrams, cooled to thousandths of a kelvin. Its oscillations decay at a record slow rate—over 110 hours, which corresponds to a frequency band narrower than one millionth of a hertz. Such isolation from the outside world is needed to search for quantum gravity effects. In a test, the device sensed resistance from helium-3 impurities in superfluid helium-4 at a level of ~10⁻⁸, measuring force in femtonewtons—that's like the weight of several bacteria.
A tiny ball weighing a fraction of a milligram, suspended in a magnetic field and cooled to near absolute zero, oscillates for 110 hours without stopping—this is record isolation. The energy loss is so small that the system's entropy barely increases, making any external influence noticeable.
The pendulum already sensed nudges from single atoms of helium-3 in superfluid helium—the force was femtonewtons, less than the weight of a bacterium divided by a billion. Inspired by Schrödinger's paradoxes, physicists hope to test spacetime curvature effects at the quantum level—to see how a macroscopic object behaves like an elementary particle.
🎯 Superfluid helium can spontaneously leave an open cup—it simply flows over the edge, ignoring gravity, like a living creature.