"The nature of gravity - and whether it can be reconciled with quantum mechanics - is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Most researchers think that at a fundamental level, all phenomena follow the principles of quantum physics, but those principles do not seem to be compatible with the accepted theory of gravity. For years, researchers have been proposing experiments to show whether gravity could produce a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement."
"Now, two theoretical physicists have complicated the picture by putting forward a controversial, and seemingly counterintuitive proposal: that gravity could have quantum effects without itself being a quantum theory. Entanglement occurs when two objects share a common quantum state, meaning that measurements of a property of one object will predict with certainty the results of measurements on the other object."
"In their study, Howl and Aziz calculated the interactions of two masses on the basis of a simplified version of general relativity, the accepted theory of gravity first introduced by Albert Einstein in 1915. The two researchers worked not in the context of 'vanilla' quantum mechanics but in that of quantum field theory - a more advanced formulation of quantum physics in which everything, including matter, is a wave propagating in a quantum field."
Gravity and quantum mechanics remain incompatible at a fundamental level. Entanglement links two objects by a shared quantum state so that measurements on one determine outcomes on the other. Previous reasoning held that gravitationally mediated entanglement would require gravity to be quantum. A calculation using a simplified form of general relativity combined with quantum field theory for matter treats particles as waves in fields and computes two-mass interactions. The calculation shows that quantum-like effects can arise in matter interacting gravitationally without requiring gravity itself to be formulated as a quantum theory.
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