How weak is gravity? It takes the entire mass of the Earth to pull that apple to the ground! The force of gravity becomes stronger the more mass objects have and the closer they are to each other. Its effects only become visible when we talk about objects as large as the Earth and are virtually unnoticeable if you consider for instance, the gravitational attraction between the individual apples on the tree.So, what makes gravity so much weaker than all the other forces?
We searched through scores of proton-proton collisions to find cases where a graviton may have been produced and then vanished immediately into these higher dimensions. So far, with the data available at the end of 2010, we have not found any evidence for these particles and as a result we were able to place constraints on the size and the number of these extra dimensions.
However, so far in 2011 we have accumulated 30 times more data than was available in 2010. With so many proton-proton collisions at the highest energies ever achieved, the likelihood of a scientific breakthrough has increased tremendously. Who knows what we may discover and what Pandora’s Box it might open. The beauty of science is that there will always be one more question to answer.
Dr Sarah Alam Malik is a postdoctoral associate in Particle Physics. She works on the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, Switzerland and the Tevatron experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, USA. Her research interests can be found here.
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