11 november 2008

If I could turn back time,....

But that is physically impossible, no ? Ever wondered about time? What is between the time clicks ? seconds, nanoseconds, femtoseceonds... continuously smaller tickmarks but eventually continuity breaks down as Planck constant kicks in. Can we "see" these ultimate time slices ? Stuff for a serious Nobel Price here... Read on... Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big). Hogan outlines his predictions in a paper published on 30 October in Physical Review D1.

Geen opmerkingen: