Igor Pikovski recently decided to tackle one of the holy grails of physics: discovering the quantum soul of gravity. Quantum physics was formulated more than a century ago by the collective efforts of many scientists, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr, to explain some puzzling experimental results, and it has been an active field of inquiry ever since. We’ve come to understand that quantum physics can explain all kinds of strange effects in the universe.
In fact, it can describe almost everything—except gravity. Many scientists have attempted to ferret out how gravity and quantum physics intersect, using string theory, for example, or theories of everything, says Pikovski. READ MORE: What Physicists Have Been Missing One way to connect them would be to observe a graviton, a hypothetical and unobserved elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for gravity in quantum field theories.
Until recently, scientists thought that detecting a single graviton would be impossible. Pikovski says this thinking was rooted in faulty assumptions about the way the universe works. He is currently building a prototype graviton detector.
The hunt for the graviton has been overshadowed by the hunt for dark matter, says Pikovski, but he thinks a machine that could detect a graviton might be ready within a decade or two. I recently spoke with Pikovski about his graviton detector and why AI is bad at creative physics. What we understand is that if quantum physics is really the underlying description of how the world works, it means that everything is made out of particles.
Matter is made out of atoms. Atoms are made out of things like protons and electrons. We can explain everything that interacts in a framework where there is a particle associated with it.
This is the modern view of physics, which is known as the standard model. But then there is this one speculative particle, which is outside of the standard model, and that’s the particle associated with gravity, the graviton. Now, we can write it down mathematically or postulate it, but the reason it was always assumed that it’s completely impossible to detect is because we had this intuition that gravity is something that really affects only the very, very big scales.
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