I choked on this part:<p>> The discussion recalls a messy, largely forgotten episode from the dawn of the quantum era. In 1905, Einstein interpreted experimental data to mean that light is “quantized,” coming in discrete particles now called photons. Others, including Niels Bohr and Max Planck, thought that the classical, wave nature of light might still be saved. [...] Most physicists presume that everything in the world is quantized, including gravity. But proving that assumption will entail a new war, one that has only just begun.<p>1) No, that is not a "messy, largely forgotten episode", rather, it is frequently re-told and almost a required Inshallah of every piece on quantum physics.<p>2) Please spare me that "war" simile, it only shows you're an American who can not write too well. War on drugs. War on poverty. War on whatever. The Browser Wars. Dude get a grip. Don't always "killer feature", "shot him dead", "waged war on the germs in her refrigerator". We have to fight a "war" to find out whether spacetime is quantum? Rilly??
So I thought gravity was basically the curvature of spacetime. But if there's a "gravity" particle, those two things seem mutually exclusive?<p>Can someone who understands this please explain it to me, thanks!
> physicists are debating what it would really prove.<p>Well, if we can detect the graviton before we have a working quantum theory of gravity, it would mean that gravity is in fact quantized and that we just need to figure it out. This would be a very big deal.
The fact that QED and QCD are renormalizable while gravity is not is probably trying to tell us something deeper than we think.<p>Relevant paper:<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.3555" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.3555</a><p>You can read the first two paragraphs of the Introduction and then skip to the last sentence of the Conclusion if you want to bypass all the math.
I'm with the debaters on this one, the energy levels of a bound quantum system are predetermined to change in quantized intervals irrespective of if they are coupled to a classical or quantum field. What theory of gravity is this experiment intended to falsify?<p>It would be great to have an independent gravitational wave detector though.
I don't understand what a graviton <i>is</i>. The article implies that it's something that communicates <i>changes</i> in gravity? Is that correct?<p>How does it communicate the magnitude of the change? By having lots of gravitons? Or does it have something akin to a frequency?
Can we take a metascience / meta-scicomms perspective? Quanta magazine, like all scicomm journos, relies on the receptive access to researchers for source content, especially exclusive results. So scicomms is essentially the same kind of access-journalism evryone comolains about in DC beltway rwporting, but amplified & couched in the 'but science" brand. In Quanta's case, its sources are quantum physicists / particle physicists. So couching everything in terms of quantized particles (bonus points if somehow 'spooky') avails of the continued access. Articles from the likes of Quanta get cited in particle physicists' onward grant proposals. Pwrticle physicists get grant, get results which get reported just so, and the scicomm journo gets invited to show up once again to scribe away. The circle repeats, meanwhile everyone just hopes it's a virtuous one.
So the article says that Freeman Dyson calculated that only one graviton capture event would happen per billion years in a detector the size of the Earth. The new experiment however proposes to use 15 kg of super-cooled Beryllium.<p>My question is: what's the difference between the proposed Beryllium slab and Dyson's theoretical detector?
Since I read the story "The Road Not Taken" from Harry Turtledove, I cannot stop thinking that we might eventually discover that the question of the conflict between the general relativity and quantum theories is something so simple and elegant that we never even considered it before.
Another goodie:<p>> You need huge masses — think planets — to significantly warp space-time and generate obvious gravitational attraction. By way of comparison, a credit card-size magnet will stick to your fridge.<p>By way of comparison, even an Olympic pool-size balloon of hot air will float.