Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not Foamy

Well, that IS news. I've been hearing about that quantum foam stuff for decades. I envision a lot of quantum theorists heading back to their white boards.

It does not compute, nor does it follow.

What pops out of vacuum, according to calculations associated with Feynman diagramms are virtual particles. There is no such thing as a slight interaction with a photon. Does the presenter meant, that this supposed "foaming" should have presented different path length? Why on Earth should that be?

It sounds halfbaked either way, fit for beer and pretzels discussion only, as presented.

The article's author equates 'foam-like nature of space-time' with 'virtual-particle production', but they're not the same thing at all. 'Foam-like' refers to a topological property of space-time exclusively.

Think of a pot of boiling water. Now freeze the video and zoom in: you see the liquid water - representing space-time - and the bubbles - representing Something Else. In the case of boiling water, it is not that the bubbles are empty; far from it. They contain space-time of course! (and lots of other stuff besides). So what about this Something Else? What is it?

Nothing. Nothingness. Literally Non-Existence. Even the term 'contain' loses all meaning here because it implies an Interior; an Inside versus an Outside. There is no Inside. It is a 'place' 'where' Existence itself is not.

(don't forget to press Play )

All happening at Planck scales with typical Quantum randomness and through billions of light-years of which these photons travelled and so, statistically-speaking, wouldn't their path-lengths tend average out rather than diverge? These blokes *traced* the paths of these photons, did they? What else does the article say? They evidently know the initial conditions precisely enough to make such claims with confidence, no matter their having to extrapolate backwards across billions of light-years through spacetime whose randomness at the very smallest scales (which the wavelengths mentioned don't even come CLOSE to approximating, high-energy gamma rays or no). Lastly, consider the source: Yahoo! News. Why? Look at some of the other science 'news' on that site whilst noting that, to Yahoo! at any rate, these too pass for Science.

I have to agree that virtual particles and space time smoothness have no correlation, and with all you said in this post. It's sad what some people call science.

I think we're in way over our pay grade here.

I find the less I know the easier it is to think my opinion means something (and I'm not alone).

So no espresso but quantum au Lait?

OK , I'll admit that I'm as far from being an astrophysicist as I am from being next year's gold-medalist Olympian swimmer....and, this research MIGHT be "Spot-On".
But :
"researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart.

Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier 'bubbles' in the quantum theorists' proposed space-time foam."

Seems that either (S O M E) science is based on a LOT of assumptions, or, the researchers don't care to divulge the ('obvious') "insurance/controls", so as to win-over us skeptical types. i.e. -

What 'controls' were employed here, to insure that they weren't simply observing 3 ('random') photons that happened to arrive at that exact time interval; with Others arriving at various intervals BEFORE, and still OTHERS arriving at various intervals AFTERWARD...?

Likewise,

how on earth do these researchers KNOW that all 3 of THESE ('observed') photons came out of the SAME event, as opposed to each of them being ejected by several distinctly different events at different times AND different distances from the (Fermi) Telescope, along 'similar' paths...?

For how long does the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST) REMAIN focused on any individual point in the sky when performing such distant interrogations? Could events in far-distant deep space POSSIBLY be separated by mere light-weeks (or light-days) in some cases, as opposed to the enormous numbers of light-years we hear so frequently stated...?

Knowledge is great , and well worth striving to achieve. Still, when such esoteric axioms are announced with such seemingly little evidence, I still chuckle as I recall ~

("Thanks" Mr. Rumsfeld)

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

... _{Still, there will always be those , voracious for tripe}...

I have the same concern. I wouldn't call 1 millisecond apart as a dead heat. What is the time expected for smooth space, and what is expected for quantum space? This doesn't convince me of anything.

Don't be too dismissive, you'd have to read the actual research paper to understand their reasoning and I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than the (newspaper?) article you cite.

Much of modern day science can no long be explained to the layperson, what we read in magazines like "New Scientist" is usually a gross oversimplification.

Part of getting education is learning enough, so you can recognise when you're way out of your depth. How many of us know a bit about relativity? Lots. How many of us can do the Tensor calculus that it's based on? Well not me for a start.

You're 100% right with regard to what you say; however ... (no offense intended), I reserve the right to be as 'dismissive' as I think prudent.

How many times have 'new-age' theoreticians and the like gone after Einstein, Hawking, and others (including each other), only to have the tables turned-back (sometimes years later)? Granted, that isn't always the case (everyone makes a mistake-or-two here-or-there), but if we all jumped onto every 'bandwagon' that came around touting new theories as tho' they were axiomatic, we would feel pretty silly trying to defend ourselves!

As I tried to express, above, my wish would be that such articles would include sufficient detail so as to "win-over" the skeptics (such as myself).

For the author to (apparently) Make-The-Case (for the "team of researchers") that we can all totally ignore ("dismiss") the countless other photons released by the event in question (just how many DID it eject? Googols?) ... just 'rest-assured' that the 3 photons that hit their receptor-target ALL came from the exact same instant-in-time of the exact same event, 7 billion years ago. ... It cannot possibly BE that during the past 7 billion years of ever-accelerating expansion of the universe, 1 (or 2, or all 3?) of these particular photons actually occurred as a result of something else...(?)

Are YOU, yourself, "Absolutely-Positively-Convinced" that this lonely / solitary piece of "evidence" proves beyond ANY shadow of any doubt that:

Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not Foamy

( ? ) Just askin' ~

I agree with you. Dismissive is good, that's how science works: anything and anybody (including Einstein) is open to a challenge, all you need is some pretty conclusive evidence (and three rogue photons may not be enough).

I too get annoyed by half baked reports of fantastic new theories, but I think it's often the reporter not the scientist/s who are trying to create the controversy. Look at the reams written about climate change, lots of hot air and opinions but rarely anything concrete and in context.

And yes, I too would like articles about Science stuff to include a whole lot more technical detail, unfortunately it doesn't sell (and only confuses the average journalist).

Something good finally came of this.

All this talk about foam has made me thirsty for a brewski.

Space Genious