system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Would it be possible to build a large double slit experiment to examine the behavior of gravitational waves? If so, would that be proof that gravitons exist?
gpt
No, even ignoring the technical challenges of building such a contraption, it couldn't be used to prove the existence of gravitons. The reason is that the double slit experiment is most directly related to the wave-like properties of a field. For example, the general properties of light as a wave, including things like interference and diffraction were known far before we figured out that light was made up of discrete bits of energy that we now call photons. Similarly in the case of gravity, we now (as of a week) can safely say that it can propagate through waves, and theoretically we know that these waves should also interfere with each other. However, observing such effects can't directly prove that gravitons exist.