Posted on 02/03/2012 5:46:10 AM PST by LibWhacker
An experiment going up outside of Chicago will attempt to measure the intimate connections among information, matter and spacetime. If it works, it could rewrite the rules for 21st-century physics
Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital.
It is a breezy, early autumn afternoon when Hogan takes me to see the machine he is building to pick out this noise. A bright-blue shed rises out of the khaki prairie of the Fermilab campus, the only sign of new construction at this 45-year-old facility. A fist-wide pipe runs 40 meters from the shed to a long, perpendicular bunker, the former home of a beam that for decades shot subatomic particles north toward Minnesota. The bunker has been reclaimed by what Hogan calls his Holometer, a device designed to amplify the jitter in the fabric of space.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
It is more likely that time is digital (or quantized). For space to be digital, it would have to be “holely” in that marbles in a jar have spaces between them. That would be not allowed. If time were digital, particles could be like marbles in a jar.
Now, hold on a second, if you FLIP the concept, and imagine that space is like “holes” in a jar of marbles that OVERLAP and occupy, in part, the same space as other marbles, that’d give you a lot of jitter eh!
Gamma ray observations have already placed a lower limit on the graininess of space, much lower than the Planck scale.
You are overlooking the possibility that those marbles are all identically shaped cubes. No gaps between cubes.
Michio Kaku disagrees. He believes the world and the universe are like an incredible, smoothly running machine devoid of chaos.
So...uh...WE are the SIMS!
space can not be cubes.
If there were cubes, the vibrations would be different along a diagonal vs. along an axis and we could see the difference.
This is why time is probably quantized and not space.
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