General relativity versus quantum mechanics By Kate Becker 05/02/2013 08:35:00 PM MDT Something is wrong with gravity.

Sure, it seems to work well enough in ordinary situations: It reliably tugs fly balls back down to Earth, holds the ocean in the sea bed and keeps our feet on t he ground. It works whether you are on Earth or on Mars, whether you're floating in the International Space Station or sitting on the surface of a white dwarf s tar. Follow Einstein's equations of gravity, codified in the theory of general r elativity, to the letter, and you can predict exactly how gravity will work in e ven the most extraordinary places in the cosmos. So why are physicists convinced that gravity is broken? Are they intellectual hy pochondriacs, forever searching for signs of disease in a perfectly healthy theo ry? The trouble is that though general relativity passes every test we can think up for it, physicists just can't reconcile it with the rules of quantum mechanics. And to physicists' frustration, quantum mechanics is just as bulletproof as grav ity. So far, no experiment has found a hole in either one. So we are left with two tried and tested theories, each foolproof in its own dom ain -- for quantum mechanics, that is the realm of the very small, and for gravi ty, the "macro" world of cells, people, stars and galaxies -- but fundamentally incompatible where the two domains intersect. Fortunately for most of us, they d on't intersect very often. But this is bad news for physicists, who are left wit h few opportunities to test either theory at or near its breaking point. One such breaking point exists inside a black hole, where matter is so dense tha t no matter how hard you try to escape -- even if you have a rocket ship powered by all the energy in the cosmos -- you still can't tear away from gravity's pul l. Yet if gravity really does squash matter into a tiny, single point inside a b lack hole, then that point is so small that we can't describe it properly withou t invoking the rules of quantum mechanics. The result is a mathematical contradiction. Perhaps we could resolve the impasse if we could peer inside a black hole and see what's really happening in there, but that is impossible: Because not even light can escape from a black hole, the inner machinery of the black hole is by its very nature hidden. Physicists are not prepared to accept that the mystery is unsolvable, though. So they seek out natural laboratories in the cosmos that might reveal cracks in th eir theories. Last week, physicists revealed the results of a test of general re lativity in one of the most extreme such laboratories yet: a pair of dead stars orbiting each other about 7,000 light-years from Earth. One of these stars happens to be a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar core so he avy that it has collapsed down into a city-sized ball. A pulsar is a powerful ma gnet, and that causes radiation to stream out from the star's magnetic poles. Wh en the beam of radiation is pointed at Earth, we see it as a pulse that repeats every time the pulsar rotates. So a pulsar is a natural clock -- and it keeps ex cellent time. What makes this particular pulsar special is that it is unusually massive, about twice the mass of our sun, and it is orbiting extremely close to another dead s tar called a white dwarf. This makes it a superb laboratory to test one predicti on of general relativity: that, with each orbit, the stars should lose a little

bit of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Over time, the stars should orbit more quickly as they drift closer and closer t o each other. By precisely timing pulses from the pulsar, physicists can clock t he rate at which the orbit is changing and look for any deviations -- no matter how slight -- from Einstein's theory. But they found no deviations. Everything was just as general relativity predicte d, leaving Einstein victorious but physicists frustrated -- and searching for an other, more extreme test of a theory that refuses to reveal its flaws. http://www.dailycamera.com/science-columnists/ci_23160708/general-relativity-vsquantum-mechanics-both-bulletproof-yet