Free-falling atoms in space put a new twist on Galileo’s gravity test
SMRTR summary
Scientists on China's Tiangong space station recreated Galileo's famous gravity experiment, but with atoms instead of cannonballs. Two clouds of rubidium atoms with different masses fell at nearly identical rates, matching with a precision of 0.05 thousandths of a percent. This confirms Einstein's weak equivalence principle. Testing atoms in orbit matters because, unlike larger objects, atoms follow quantum physics rules.
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