New Discovery about the Fabric of Space-Time (Video), page
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Topic started on 7-1-2012 @ 09:35 AM by isyeye
Scientists have turned up rare evidence that space-time is smooth as Einstein predicted, while pushing closer to a complete theory of gravity. From NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.

This is a fantastic video. Space-time can be a very hard concept to understand. Science is continually giving us more evidence that space and time are directly related, and though much is yet to be discovered and understood, the possibilities to be had in this knowledge are endless.


reply posted on 7-1-2012 @ 11:20 AM by micpsi
reply to post by isyeye


The lady astronomer is totally wrong. The gamma ray photon, although very energetic, had a wavelength that was still 20 orders of magnitude larger than the scale of space-time that quantum mechanics predicts is foamy, namely, the Planck scale of 10^(-33) cm, as even the shortest wavelength of a gamma ray ever observed is about 10(-13)cm. This means that one cannot deduce that space-time is smooth, as Einstein predicted, just because the low-energy and the high-energy photons arrived at the same time after a long journey. That is a wild conclusion, unjustified by this observation. Instead, all one can safely claim is that any clumpiness in space-time was too small to slow down even the high-energy gamma ray, which is what any good student of physics would tell you. The lady astronomer needs to learn about gravitation on the Planck scale, instead of exaggerating the importance of her discovery. The foaminess is still there - it is just too small to have slowed down the high-energy gamma ray.

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