Physics is difficult. Do you want to spot a ripple in space-time? You just need a detector capable of seeing a length change less than a millionth the size of an atom. Do you want to find a Higgs boson? No problem – as long as you have $ 7 billion, 14 years and 6000 scientists to be delivered. However, an experience is so difficult to even make the happiest gulp physicist: testing the idea that gravity is quantum.
A theory of quantum gravity is the exceptional objective of modern physics. It would conciliate two currently incompatible pillars of our description of the universe: general relativity, our theory of large -scale gravity; And quantum mechanics, our microcopic account of other fundamental forces of nature. Individually, these have been carefully tested, always passing with flying colors. Try again to combine them and things collapse. If we could show that gravity is quantum, perhaps by finding a quantum particle, the problem would be almost resolved. However, even our most powerful detectors do not approach the extraordinarily high energies considered to be necessary to find these so-called gravitons.
Not long ago, the late the theorist Freeman Dyson echoes the mood among many physicists when he argued that quantum gravity could simply be non -testable. But recently, some have started to say that this may not be the case. If this is true, we could soon see the first clues of the way in which the two most fundamental theories of nature relate to each other. “It seems to me that, technologically speaking, time is opportune,” says Vlatko veddral …
