Klaatu barada nikto!
Posted on 08/12/2009 3:42:19 PM PDT by decimon
ON THE night of 30 June 2005, the sky high above La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands crackled with streaks of blue light too faint for humans to see. Atop the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the island, though, a powerful magic eye was waiting and watching.
MAGIC - the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope - scans the sky each night for high-energy photons from the distant cosmos. Most nights, nothing remarkable comes. But every now and again, a brief flash of energetic light bears witness to the violent convulsions of a faraway galaxy.
What MAGIC saw on that balmy June night came like a bolt from the blue. That is because something truly astounding may have been encoded in that fleeting Atlantic glow: evidence that the fabric of space-time is not silky smooth as Einstein and many others have presumed, but rough, turbulent and fundamentally grainy stuff.
It is an audacious claim that, if verified, would put us squarely on the road to a quantum theory of gravity and on towards the long-elusive "theory of everything". If it were based on a single chunk of MAGIC data, it might easily be dismissed as a midsummer night's dream. But it is not. Since that first sighting, other telescopes have started to see similar patterns. Is this a physics revolution through the barrel of a telescope?
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
May be of interest.
Klaatu barada nikto!
Muy interesante.
Am not.
bttt
pinging my favorite FReeper cosmologists
Thanks for the ping, dear Kevmo!
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Picture this: Teddy Roosevelt is on safari on the Serengeti, and he sees both lion dung and elephant dung lying about on the ground. He calls one of the new guides over and asks what he (the guide) makes of that, and the answer he anticipates is something like "Well, Bwana, some elephants done been around here, and some lions done been here TOO!"
The answer which Teddy DOESN'T expect to hear, at least if the man means to keep his job, is that some sort of a magical animal with properties of both lions AND elephants had been around and pooped up the place.
That would clearly be idiotic and, yet, when you open any physics book to the page on "photons", that selfsame logic is PRECISELY what you see. People in coming ages are going to laugh themselves silly when they see that.
So what you’re saying is that Science is MAGIC?
Thanks for the ping!
This is truly a fascinating development, dear Kevmo! I'm attracted to Amelino-Camelia's ideas. He seems to be "quantizing" space-time, which would give it a description that is not only "grainy," but also "jumpy." If one is looking for a "graviton," this would appear to be an interesting way to go about doing it. The "foaming froth" of string theory looks a tad squishy in comparison: I don't know how it would be possible to design an experiment to observe a "foaming froth." But then I'm no scientific genius, and that's for sure.
On the other hand, it seems to me an "epistemological problem" gets dragged into this game with the concept of Planck length. All the Planck length is, when you really boil it all down, is the smallest increment of space (and time, now space-time) that the human mind can conceive or measure. But this does not necessarily mean that there are not smaller objects in Nature that escape our notice because they are on a scale less than Planck length can measure. This means such objects (if they exist) are ineluctibly unobservable in principle. In short, the Planck length seems to bespeak a limit on human cognition that cannot be overcome.
Just wondering out loud about this. And also about this: In quantum theory, we have matrix mechanics and wave mechanics, each respectively describing the same system in different ways. One focuses on particle behavior, the other on wave behavior. (Even though it was he who first put the photon — particulate light — on the map, Einstein was arguably deep-down a "wave" kind of guy. His smoothly curving space-time is perhaps a reflection of this.) Thus enters Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, which deals with physical situations in which two seemingly mutually exclusive quantum phenomena (i.e., particle or waveform) are found to be necessary to the complete description of the system they comprise. Both are measurable quantities; the problem is you can't measure them both at the same time. This is where quantum uncertainty comes into the picture. These insights pertain to material behavior at the deepest level of physics.
This is just to suggest that maybe Amelino-Camelia's quantized space-time and Einstein's smoothly curving model may be in some sense "complementarities."
Thank you again for the ping, Kevmo! Please keep me posted if you see anything more on this subject — I'll be looking, too.
Fascinating, thanks for posting and pinging me.
Thanks for the ping, LW.
SunkenCiv: Why now?
R2.
My pleasure!
Some guy named Ray FReepmailed me. ;’)
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