A team of physicists hit just 3 million to test this Law of gravity Never before.
Eric Edelberger, Jens Gundlach, and Blaine Heckley “tested our understanding of gravity, won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2021 for its basic measure of accuracy, examined its nature. Shyam .Raja And set the limits of dark matters on couples, “representatives of the Breakthrough Prize announced today (Sept. 10).
All three, the leaders of the T-Wash Research Group at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, have developed sensitive enough devices to measure gravity, the weakest of nature’s four basic forces, at surprisingly short distances. Such work has helped shape the big-picture understanding of physicists The universe.
Related: The four basic forces of nature
For example, consider team research Of Isaac Newton The inverse square law, which determines that the force of gravity between two objects, is proportional to the square of the distance between them. (Gravitational attraction decreases by a factor of four if the distance between objects is doubled.)
In Nidhi Square law has survived every test to date. But physicists are investigating it on smaller and smaller scales, as there may be a breach revealing “new physics” – predicted by additional parameters String theory, for example.
It was recently demonstrated by Edelberger, Gundlach, Heckle, and their colleagues that verse-square law also holds for objects. Different from just 52 microns (0.002 inches), “Any additional dimension must be curved with a radius less than 1/3 of the diameter of human hair,” (representatives of the Breakthrough Prize wrote in today’s award announcement.
The Breakthrough Prize in Science and Mathematics was founded in 2012 by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chen, Sergei Brin, Anne Wozniacki and Yuri and Julia Milner. The annual awards aim to promote groundbreaking research in life sciences, mathematics and basic physics and inspire children to pursue careers in science and technology, the Breakthrough Prize representatives said.
The breakthrough prize is the richest in science, each three times more than the Nobel Prize. (These days the Nobel comes with a cash prize of 9 million Swedish kronor, about 1 1 million at current exchange rates.) This year, four $ 3 million breakthrough awards have been awarded in life sciences, one in mathematics and two in basic physics.
Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, received the second physics award for his special breakthrough award for particle physics, gravity and cosmology, and for communications, in recognition of “continuous leadership in fundamental physics.”[ng] Science to a wide audience. ”
Weinberg also has a Nobel Prize under his belt, which he shared the prize of physics with Sheldon Lee Glassho and Abdus Salam for that year, for “contributing to the theory of uniformly weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles.” Noble summary notes.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation also presented a few small prizes to career researchers earlier this year, with a total purse of. 21.75 million. All these prizes were announced today. You can learn more about them Here.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on September 10 at 11:20 a.m. EDT to show that the breakthrough prize in fundamental physics was not for Edelberger, Gundlach, Heckley, in particular, the Eat-Wash group.
Mike W. Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the quest for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @Mamildld. Follow us on Twitter @speed.com or Facebook.
