Enlightenment

摘要

To some, it might seem that Eric Adelberger is on a wild goose chase. Not only is he trying to disprove Newton's law of gravity, which has withstood over 300 years of scrutiny, but for years now every experiment he has done at the University of Washington in Seattle has come up with zilch. Despite this, Adelberger has no shortage of graduate students keen to help, even though they are all getting null results too. So what's going on - why do they bother? Because the first person to find what they are looking for will make history. Find the blip, and you have proved that gravity leaks out from our world into hidden dimensions. It might seem like a far-fetched scenario, but it seems to be the best way to explain the strangeness of gravity, a force totally unlike the three others we have observed in the universe - the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces. For a start, every bit of matter, from the tiniest speck of dust to the greatest star, generates gravity and attracts every other thing. But its most curious aspect is its strength.