A Tiny Glass Bead Goes as Still as Nature Allows
Inside a small metal box on a laboratory table in Vienna, physicist Markus Aspelmeyer and his team have engineered, perhaps, the quietest place on Earth. The area in question is a microscopic spot in the middle of the box. Here, levitating in midair\u2014except there is no air because the box is in vacuum\u2014is a tiny glass bead a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand. Aspelmeyer\u2019s apparatus uses lasers to render this bead literally motionless.