The specific way they measured the shift — comparing two parts of the same cloud — allowed

them to cancel out a lot of noise that was common to both parts. It’s like measuring a sailboat in
rough seas. Even as it lurches up and down unpredictably, the distance between the keel and
mast will always stay constant. While a clock made of a cloud of atoms can drift due to any
number of things — electric fields, magnetic fields, the laser light itself, heat from the
environment — the difference in frequencies between the top and bottom of the cloud remains
the same. Measuring that difference revealed the effect of gravity. “That’s not trivial to do,” said
Andrew Ludlow, an atomic clock expert at the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
who was not involved with the research.

According to the preprint, this demonstration is a step toward studying the union of general
relativity and quantum mechanics. (The authors declined to be interviewed until the paper is
published in a peer-reviewed journal.)
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Relativity describes a space-time in which objects have well-defined properties and move
predictably from one location to another. In quantum theory, by contrast, an object can be in a
“superposition” of many properties at once, or it can suddenly jump into a particular location.
These two descriptions match their respective realms of reality well, but they’re incongruous
when taken together.

So what happens when both quantum mechanics and relativity are necessary to describe a
phenomenon?

Take the case where a massive object is put into a superposition of two possible locations at the
same time. General relativity says that any object with mass should bend the fabric of space-
time. But what if that object is in a superposition? Is the geometry of space-time also in a
superposition?

In order to study such questions, physicists are always looking for systems where both gravity
and quantum mechanics are important. “Clocks are for sure one of the most promising systems to
test these types of features,” said Flaminia Giacomini, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Clocks naturally straddle the line between
quantum mechanics and relativity. They tell time, which is an inherently relativistic concept.
They’re also fundamentally quantum: The way the electrons move from one energy level to
another is by passing through a superposition of being in both levels.