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The Universe As Hologram
Several readers sent in news of theoretical work bolstering the proposition that the universe may be a hologram. The story begins at the German experiment GEO600, a laser inteferometer looking for gravity waves. For years, researchers there have been locating and eliminating sources of interference and noise from the experiment (they have not yet seen a gravity wave). For months they have been puzzling over a source of noise they could not explain. Then Craig Hogan, a Fermilab physicist, approached them with a possible answer: that GEO600 may have stumbled upon a fundamental limit where space-time stops behaving like a smooth continuum and instead dissolves into "grains." The "holographic principle" suggests that the universe at small scales would be "blurry," its smallest features far larger than Planck scale, and possibly accessible to current technology such as the GEO600. The holographic principle, if borne out, could help distinguish among competing theories of quantum gravity, but "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited," the lead GEO600 scientist said.
This story reminds me of an amazing book written in the late 1800's, "Flatland", which applies today more than ever.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
You might be right, but your explanation is not what I understood from the article (but translating dense physics-speak isn't my forte either;-)). What I understood from it is that they've still not been able to measure gravity waves, so we still don't know if gravity behaves like a particle or not. What they're saying, is that space and time might be grainy, and even more grainy than was previously thought and possibly even so grainy that it renders our current attempt of measuring gravity waves futile.
So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.
0x or or snor perron?!
Science as we know it today was pretty much invented by Sir Francis Bacon, a philosopher. It unifies large swaths of epistemology and ontology, thereby rendering much of the field of philosophy entirely obsolete. That the vast majority of so-called philosophers haven't figured this out after 400+ years is one of my largest peeves with academia because, as a direct result of their masturbatory inertia, philosophy has been pushed into an intellectual corner.
So I don't blame you for not understanding that all science is properly a subset of philosophy. Most philosophy professors I've met don't really understand that either. :(
No it doesn't. Science intentionally limits itself to that which can be observed and tested in a rational manner. Science does not and cannot say that the Universe is actually like that. Some philosophers say that, most scientists say that, and all athiests say that, but Science itself does not make that assumption.