Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth

http://www.space.com/19202-einstein-space-time-smooth.html

So scientists studied photons from a gamma ray burst that arrived around the same time. If spacetime was foamy, as many scientists believed, the idea is they should have gotten knocked around on the way, yet they arrived very close to the same time.

If this holds up, it could have some pretty big implications. It could mean particles don't pop in and out of existence as was thought. A lot of phenomena that have been observed were chalked up to 'foaminess', like the Casmir effect.

It is a lot to base off a few photons though, and we saw what happened last time when they announced particles had exceeded the speed of light...

Thoughts?

 

I love it. Only shows how little we actually know. I pray we find the answers some day. We're certainly on the way.

 

My only thought is that I have never believed the nonsense of particles acting like magicians. Just that we needed to use that as an approximation for their behavior to get closer to the truth. I feel the same about black holes, "singularities", etc. Stuff does not work like magic.

 

3 photons from a source 7 BILLION light years away. I think that head exploding gif might be very appropriate.

How do we know that that's what they are?

Anyway, I reckon the detector triple posted or something. That's my utterly uneducated opinion.

 

CIA did it :icon_chee


Edit: no, it was cute kittnes

 

lol, I would disagree, a society based on materialism and self - distracted by iPhones and twitter.

The social engineers are moulding the society - not for the better.


The great thinkers of the world are nearly extinct.

 

It is like asking what is the resolution of spacetime - like the pixels on a monitor. The resolution appears to be much higher or possibly infinitely high.

Possible implications - there is no minimum scale, or if there is a minimum scale to space-time it is smaller than we thought. We wouldn't have work arounds for things, like the uncertainty principle - in the future we would not be able to predict particles behavior with better precision and stuck with making probabilistic measurements like we do now.

 

Einstein may have agreed with a lot of that - some of the weird shit in QM probably won't be overturned, because it produces results. But this case, at least for now, it appears physicists may have overthought the magic.

 

Same goes for extra dimensions, imo. They are a logical construct, not a part of the physical world. There are no physical dimensions. Minds will be blown. The solutions will be elegant and simple, but it will take a lot of wild ass magical guesswork to find them.

 

Yes and no. I meant to include the dumbing down and conditioning of society being our biggest hurdle and that if we can clear it, there's nothing stopping us but decided to stick with a simple positive post.

That said, there are still geniuses at work and they are making real progress every day. You just don't see it on TV or the news. We would rather glorify Kim Kardashian simply existing rather than honor the people ushering us in to a bright future. It's sad, but I have faith we can overcome it.

 

Ocean, can you explain this for the dimwitted (me)?

Is the improbability there because they travelled for such a long time (7 billion years) and you would have expected them to each get deflected about by the "foam" in all that time, thus arriving at different times/points?

What is the probability of them travelling for all that time, and not bumping into something more concrete, like a star or a comet's trail or something? Are these orders of magnitude different?

 

Amazing how Einstein theories still hold up even with our Best scientist trying to debunk them

 

on the topic of really small things

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50434185/ns/technology_and_science-space/

 

Is this about that dude that made this device out of rubber bands and tin foil to measure the time between the arrival of gamma particles?

I saw something about it on the science channel the other day, but I was pretty wasted by then.

 

I also heard something about he largest quasar group ever found at like 2-4 billion light years across. Apparently the size of it compared to the size of other objects in the universe challenges the notion of a standard universal constant at that scale.

I don't know what any of that means though.

Edit: Looks like that's what Mooshy posted.

 

war einstein

 

That is my understanding. They should have been spaced out a bit more if foam affected them.

What is the probability of them travelling for all that time, and not bumping into something more concrete, like a star or a comet's trail or something? Are these orders of magnitude different?[/QUOTE]

Good question - even though space is mostly empty, the gamma ray burst was 7 billion light years away - a good chunk of space. You'd think they may hit something. Perhaps the idea is if they did hit something, they wouldn't have reached earth at all.

 

Maybe the great philosophers and Renaissance men are, but our body of scientific knowledge continues to grow and we still have great minds working on the big questions about reality IMO. Unless we lose the information we have Library-of-Alexandria style, I think we can only really close in on information.

Now what we do with that body of scientific knowledge, and whether or not we are using it toward the REALLY big questions, that is another story and you may well be right.

 

I popped in here, read the first couple of lines of OP then decided to go to the 'Carano is off the market' thread. My brain isn't in gear this early on a sat morning.