DREAM DASHED
Theory of Everything shelved
View from below, inside the 479-foot (146-meter) tall drop tower with typical experimental capsule.
SCIENTISTS dropped an experiment nearly five stories down an elevator shaft of sorts to test a possible way to meld the physical theory of the very small - quantum mechanics - with the very large - general relativity, to create a theory of everything. General relativity, on the other hand, governs the realm of the very large, describing how gravity acts on some of the largest, densest, heaviest things in the universe like stars and black holes. Yet to the enduring frustration of physicists, these two grand theories seem incompatible with each other. So far, the laws of the very small and the very large are impossible to reconcile. A new experiment offers hope by probing the very boundary between these two realms, the researchers said. They experimented with a special type of super-cold matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. The Bose-Einstein condensate in the experiment was composed of a cloud of millions of rubidium atoms that were cooled to temperatures nearing absolute zero. At this point, they basically lose their individual identities and can be described by a single macroscopic wave function essentially an equation from quantum mechanics, but on a large scale. The researchers then dropped a capsule containing the Bose-Einstein condensate down a very tall tower built especially for scientific experiments. The drop allowed the material to experience weightlessness during its brief freefall. The lack of gravity caused the gas to expand, and allowed the scientists to study the gravitational effects on the quantum gas. The experiment showed that such projects could offer a fertile ground for testing the murky boundary between quantum mechanics and general relativity, the researchers said. They hope to one day send such an experiment to space, perhaps on the International Space Station. .................................................................................................
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