The most exciting discovery in physics could come about thanks to telecoms satellites.
Watching a rocket as it slowly starts to heave itself out of Earth’s deep gravity well and then streaks up into the blue, you suddenly grasp on a visceral level the energies involved in space exploration. One minute that huge cylinder is sitting quietly on its launching pad; the next, its engines fire up with a brilliant burst of light. Clouds of exhaust fill the sky, and the waves of body-shaking thunder never seem to end.
To get anywhere in space, you have to travel astounding distances. Even the Moon is about 400,000 km away. And yet the hardest part – energy-wise, anyway – is just getting off the ground. Clear that hurdle, slip the bonds of Earth, and you’re off. Gravity’s influence falls away and suddenly, travel becomes a lot cheaper.
So it might be surprising to hear that the most exciting new frontier in space exploration starts a mere 2,000 km above the terrestrial surface. We aren’t talking about manned missions, automatic rovers or even probes. We’re talking about satellites. Even more prosaically, we’re talking about communications satellites, in low Earth orbit. Yes, they’ll be fitted with precision laser equipment that sends and receives particles of light – photons – in their fundamental quantum states. But the missions will be an essentially commercial proposition, paid for, in all probability, by banks eager to protect themselves against fraud.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound very romantic. So consider this: those satellites could change the way we see our Universe as much as any space mission to date. For the first time, we will be able to test quantum physics in space. We’ll get our best chance yet to see how it meshes with that other great physical theory, relativity. And at this point, we have very little idea what happens next.
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http://aeon.co/magazine/science/the-search-for-quantum-gravity
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