{"id":35022,"date":"2017-03-03T12:05:21","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T20:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/physicists-have-detected-a-friction-like-force-in-a-perfect-vacuum"},"modified":"2017-06-04T07:10:38","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:10:38","slug":"physicists-have-detected-a-friction-like-force-in-a-perfect-vacuum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/physicists-have-detected-a-friction-like-force-in-a-perfect-vacuum","title":{"rendered":"Physicists Have Detected a Friction-Like Force in a Perfect Vacuum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-have-detected-a-friction-like-force-in-a-perfect-vacuum.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>One of the most fundamental tenets of modern physics is that in a perfect vacuum \u2014 a place entirely devoid of matter \u2014 no friction can possibly exist, because empty space cannot exert a force on objects travelling through it.<\/p>\n<p>But despite the conventional wisdom, physicists in the UK discovered that a decaying atom travelling through a complete vacuum would experience a friction-like force, and now they\u2019ve figured out how this reinforces \u2014 rather than breaks \u2014 Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe spent ages searching for the mistake in the calculation and spent even more time exploring other strange effects until we found this (rather simple) solution,\u201d one of the team, Matthias Sonnleitner from the University of Glasgow <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2017-02-friction-vacuum.html\">told Lisa Zyga at Phys.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/physicists-have-detected-a-friction-like-force-in-a-perfect-vacuum#.WLmZEB-V9Mg.facebook\">http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/physicists-have-detected-a-frict...g.facebook<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most fundamental tenets of modern physics is that in a perfect vacuum \u2014 a place entirely devoid of matter \u2014 no friction can possibly exist, because empty space cannot exert a force on objects travelling through it. But despite the conventional wisdom, physicists in the UK discovered that a decaying atom travelling [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35022","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\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35022"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58518,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35022\/revisions\/58518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}