{"id":124031,"date":"2021-06-21T04:22:16","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T11:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/scientists-at-ligo-are-one-step-closer-to-solving-general-relativitys-biggest-problem"},"modified":"2021-06-21T09:49:23","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T16:49:23","slug":"scientists-at-ligo-are-one-step-closer-to-solving-general-relativitys-biggest-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/scientists-at-ligo-are-one-step-closer-to-solving-general-relativitys-biggest-problem","title":{"rendered":"Scientists at LIGO are one step closer to solving general relativity\u2019s biggest problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-at-ligo-are-one-step-closer-to-solving-general-relativitys-biggest-problem2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists are one step closer to solving general relativity\u2019s biggest problem.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>To do this, scientists used a new kind of observatory <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/38496-ligo-virgo-detect-gravitational-wave-black-hole-merger\">called LIGO<\/a> (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) that is fine-tuned to hunt for small disturbances in the fabric of spacetime caused by cosmic collisions, like black hole or neutron star mergers.<\/p>\n<p>But this is only just the beginning of what LIGO can do, a team of international researchers reports in a <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/doi\/10.1126\/science.abh2634\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\">new study<\/a> published Thursday in the journal <em>Science<\/em>. Using new techniques to quantum cool LIGO\u2019s mirrors, the team says that LIGO may soon also help them understand the quantum states of human-sized objects instead of just subatomic particles.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.mit.edu\/faculty\/vivishek-sudhir\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Vivishek Sudhir<\/a> is a coauthor on the paper and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He tells <em>Inverse <\/em>that physicists have long theorized that gravity may be the culprit behind why large items don\u2019t exhibit quantum behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists are one step closer to solving general relativity\u2019s biggest problem. To do this, scientists used a new kind of observatory called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) that is fine-tuned to hunt for small disturbances in the fabric of spacetime caused by cosmic collisions, like black hole or neutron star mergers. But this is only [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,38,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-engineering","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124046,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124031\/revisions\/124046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}