Detecting Quantum Foam

Ragetech writes: "According to this NY Times article Dr. Jack Ng, a physicist at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, has theorized that LIGO, the "Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, may be capable of detecting quantum foam. (free registration needed, yada yada)"

Comments

Link to the paper

[apsmith]

Here's the actual paper in Physical Review Letters:

http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p2946

The title is "From Computation to Black Holes and Space-Time Foam".

Physics News Update link

[apsmith]

Physics News Update also has an interesting discussion of this paper at http://www.aip.org/physnews/update/532-1.html. In the sense used by the author of this paper, a black hole is "the ultimate computer". The paper is in essence about the limits of computation!

Ng [...] finds [...] that the foaminess of spacetime leads to an uncertainty in timekeeping (the more accurate the clock, the shorter its lifetime) which in turn leads to a bound on information processing (speed and memory simultaneously) analogous to the Heisenberg bound on simultaneous measurement of momentum and position.

Applications

[indole]

This is clearly another spectacular advance in the quantum computing field, as now we can adequatly clean the quantum monitor and quantum desktop without worrying about leaving streaks. Hoorah for technology!