[HN Gopher] Quantum gravity gets a new test
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       Quantum gravity gets a new test
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2024-05-06 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (physics.aps.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (physics.aps.org)
        
       | lisper wrote:
       | The original paper is here:
       | 
       | https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.021022
       | 
       | It's worth a look. The article buries a lot of interesting
       | details. For example:
       | 
       | "These bodies are shaped like dumbbells, with each end weighing
       | less than a gram..."
       | 
       | But in the paper we read:
       | 
       | "We are thus experimenting with gold spheres of mass m [?] 1.58 x
       | 10^-10 kg"
       | 
       | So yeah, that's "less than a gram" but that's kind of like saying
       | that a gnat weighs less than a ton. It's not wrong, but it kinda
       | buries the lede.
       | 
       | This experiment sounds really cool and promising. We're looking
       | at Nobel-Prize-worthy results if it works out.
       | 
       | [UPDATE]
       | 
       | It's actually going to be even more Nobel-Prize-worthy than I
       | thought. Turns out they're not going to be doing this experiment
       | any time soon:
       | 
       | "Admittedly, this is a very challenging condition to achieve
       | experimentally. Considering temperatures in the order of
       | millikelvin, e.g., achievable by attaching the pendulum to a
       | dilution refrigerator, this would still require quality factors
       | on the order of Q = 10^10. This is 5 orders of magnitude above
       | the largest reported quality factors for torsion pendula. For
       | some types of wire materials, such as sapphire, improvements in
       | quality factors are to be expected from operation at lower
       | temperatures."
       | 
       | Imagine making a wire out of sapphire!
        
         | UseofWeapons1 wrote:
         | Great summary. Always hard to tell whether proposed experiments
         | are doable within a reasonable timeframe. Sounds like this one
         | is not, but perhaps by defining a new category it may lead to
         | one that is.
        
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