posted on Jan, 7 2012 @ 11:20 AM
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.