Tag: equivalence principle
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Dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange
Over the past few years, the MICROSCOPE spacecraft performed precision experiments to test the difference between gravitational mass, which governs how strongly matter responds to gravity, and inertial mass, which is the measure of resistance to being pushed. Our modern theory of gravity, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says these masses are equivalent, which is […]
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What goes up, must come down…except maybe antimatter
Gravity is a universally attractive force, at least as far as we can tell. However, some physicists have posited that antimatter behaves the opposite way, as though they have negative mass. Testing that hypothesis is remarkably hard, though: antimatter particles annihilate with their regular matter partners if they encounter each other (at low speeds at […]
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