Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
New Scientist started putting lots of their articles behind a subscriber wall, so I don't go by much any more. But I wandered through recently and came across this teaser.
Atomic jitters hint at quantum spume
It seems that certain properties of space-time predicted by "theories of everything" may have already influenced experiments without anyone noticing. One big problem with theories of everything is that their predictions of how space-time behaves at the smallest scales are way beyond the reach of our experiments. At least, that is the common wisdom. Now it seems that certain properties of space-time predicted by these theories may have already influenced experiments without anyone noticing.
The challenge for a theory of everything is to unify Einstein's description of gravity with quantum mechanics into a successful theory of quantum gravity. There are many candidate theories that predict that space-time fluctuates rapidly on so-called Planck scales of about 10-35 metres, but that's too small to be probed directly. "To smash our way down to these scales in a particle accelerator would take inconceivable amounts of energy," says Charles Wang, of the University of Aberdeen, UK.
Despite this, there may yet be a way to measure these space-time fluctuations indirectly, say Wang and teammates.
And it ends there, which made me laugh. As did the title, which sounds like physics porn. So I went looking and didn't find the rest of the article anywhere, but I did find this story on the same topic at CERN's website. Very interesting stuff. Or, at least, the parts of it that I could follow. Not exactly layman physics.
Oh that New Scientist. Great great site, but so titilating re: the subscriber wall. I am thinking about getting a subscription anyway, because every one of their articles is quite good for the science layman like me.
Anyway, did you hear about the way to unify the forces by picturing all basic particles as "tangles" of interconnected space-time? I.e., the simpler and more undetectable the particle, the simpler the tangle.
Supposedly this explains gravity (i.e., warped space), charges, matter, antimatter and all that jazz. And it's elegant, because it proposes that particles are not just little islands, but exist in the way that they do because of what they are connected to.
Posted by: Jon at October 22, 2006 08:06 AM