Scientists opened a sealed envelope after 10 years and gravity still didn’t make sense
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Scientists opened a sealed envelope after 10 years and gravity still didn’t make sense
Date:
May 18, 2026
Source:
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Summary:
For more than 200 years, scientists have struggled to pin down the exact strength of gravity — and one physicist spent a decade chasing the answer while keeping his own results hidden from himself. Stephan Schlamminger and his team at NIST painstakingly recreated a landmark French experiment designed to measure “big G,” the universal gravitational constant that governs everything from falling apples to galaxies. When he finally opened a sealed envelope containing the secret number needed to decode the experiment, the results brought both relief and disappointment
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FULL STORY
After 10 years of work and a dramatic sealed-envelope reveal, scientists still can’t agree on the true strength of gravity. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com
For more than two centuries, scientists have tried to determine one of the most important numbers in physics: the universal gravitational constant, known as "big G." It defines the strength of gravity throughout the universe, influencing everything from falling objects on Earth to the motion of galaxies. Yet despite its importance, researchers still cannot agree on its exact value.
That uncertainty weighed heavily on Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as he prepared to open a sealed envelope containing a crucial secret number. For nearly 10 years, Schlamminger had devoted much of his career to measuring big G with extraordinary precision. The hidden number inside the envelope would finally allow him to decode his team's results.
Why Measuring Gravity Is So Difficult
Gravity may shape the cosmos, but it is surprisingly weak compared to the other fundamental forces of nature. Electromagnetism, for example, is far stronger. Even a tiny magnet can lift a paper clip against the pull of Earth's entire gravitational field.
That weakness becomes an enormous challenge in the lab. Scientists must measure the gravitational attraction between relatively small objects, and those forces are incredibly faint. The masses used in experiments are roughly 500 billion trillion times smaller than Earth, making the gravitational pull between them extremely difficult to detect accurately.
Researchers have spent more than 225 years trying to improve measurements of big G since Isaac Newton first described gravity mathematically. Despite increasingly advanced equipment, modern experiments still produce slightly different answers. The differences are tiny, about one part in 10,000, but they are larger than expected experimental uncertainties.
That has raised an uncomfortable question. Are scientists overlooking subtle flaws in their experiments, or is there something incomplete about our understanding of gravity itself?
Recreating a Landmark Gravity Experiment
To investigate the discrepancy, Schlamminger and his colleagues decided to replicate a highly regarded experiment performed in 2007 by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France. The goal was simple in principle: see whether an independent team at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, could obtain the same result.
Schlamminger also wanted to avoid any possibility of bias. He worried that knowing the expected value might unconsciously influence his analysis. To prevent that, he asked colleague Patrick Abbott to scramble part of the data.
Abbott secretly subtracted a hidden value from measurements involving some of the experimental masses. Only Abbott knew the number. Until the envelope was opened, Schlamminger had no way of knowing the true value his experiment had produced.
The Moment of Truth
The envelope had almost been opened once before. In 2022, Schlamminger was ready to reveal the result but stopped at the last moment after realizing that a subtle air pressure effect could influence the measurement. He postponed the unveiling and continued refining the analysis.
Finally, on July 11, 2024, at the annual Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements in Aurora, Colorado, the moment arrived.
Schlamminger skipped the conference's morning sessions, preoccupied with worries about temperature fluctuations, pressure changes, and other tiny effects that might distort the results. "I had really dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's of the experiment," he said.
During his afternoon presentation, he opened the envelope and read Abbott's hidden number. At first, he felt relieved. The secret value needed to be large and negative for the experiment to align with expectations.
It was.
But as the day went on, that relief faded. The number was too large for the NIST results to match the earlier French experiment.
A New Discrepancy in Big G
After two additional years of d