{"id":245481,"date":"2026-10-16T01:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T06:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/quantum-sensor-could-measure-how-earth-drags-spacetime"},"modified":"2026-10-16T01:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T06:39:09","slug":"quantum-sensor-could-measure-how-earth-drags-spacetime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/quantum-sensor-could-measure-how-earth-drags-spacetime","title":{"rendered":"Quantum sensor could measure how Earth drags spacetime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-sensor-could-measure-how-earth-drags-spacetime.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity describes gravity as the bending of spacetime, a mathematical model that combines three-dimensional space and time into a single, four-dimensional continuum. The theory also predicts that a rotating object, such as Earth, slightly drags the surrounding spacetime as it rotates, a phenomenon known as frame-dragging.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) recently introduced the idea of a quantum sensor that could measure this tiny effect in a laboratory setting. Their proposed experiment, described in a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/q3v9-rjm9\" target=\"_blank\">published in <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i><\/a>, would use helium cooled until it enters a special phase known as the superfluid state inside a gyrometer, an instrument that measures rotation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe inspiration for this project came when Birgitta Whaley and I were visiting Markus Aspelmeyer at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna, Austria, during a sabbatical of Birgitta,\u201d Kai-Isaak Ellers, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity describes gravity as the bending of spacetime, a mathematical model that combines three-dimensional space and time into a single, four-dimensional continuum. The theory also predicts that a rotating object, such as Earth, slightly drags the surrounding spacetime as it rotates, a phenomenon known as frame-dragging. Researchers at the University of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245481","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}