Scientists from Queensland “positioned a particle close to a black gap”. What they noticed shocked them

Black holes can have totally different lots on the identical time, as confirmed by simulations by scientists from Queensland.

Analysis from the College of Queensland helps to unravel the inside workings of mysterious stellar objects and brings collectively two fields of physics – quantum mechanics and gravity.

Gravity is usually described as performing on giant scales, whereas quantum mechanics describes actions that happen on microscopic scales, and their unification has challenged physicists for many years.

UQ PhD candidate Joshua Fu led a group making an attempt to mix the 2 components, taking a look at whether or not black holes exhibit quantum properties.

“We needed to mix a elementary property of quantum mechanics, which is superposition – the concept an object can have two properties on the identical time – with black holes, that are these huge gravitational objects,” he mentioned .

Utilizing mathematical fashions, they checked out what occurs to a particle when it interacts with a simulated black gap.

They centered on the mass of the black gap – if the black gap labored in a quantum mechanical framework, this mass can be revealed as a superposition, that means that the black gap would have totally different lots on the identical time.

A well-known instance of superposition is Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, which says {that a} cat in a field might be each alive and lifeless on the identical time, and it solely decides one or the opposite when it’s being watched.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised this instance to point out the absurdity of quantum principle, however subsequent experiments and simulations have proven that particles do exist in a number of states concurrently on the quantum stage.