news tagged with: planck scale en-us internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Astrophysicists duo propose Planck star as core of black holes ( —Two astrophysics, Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto, have uploaded a paper to the preprint server arXiv in which they suggest that a structure known as a Planck star exists at the center of black holes, rather than a singularity. This would suggest, they note, that black holes at some point return all the information they have pulled in, to the universe. Astronomy & Space Fri, 14 Feb 2014 10:40:02 EDT news311593847 Smooth or grainy? New paper reviews research on the grain of space-time Smooth" or grainy? Is space-time continuous or is it made up of very fine (10-35 metres on the "Planck scale") but discrete grains, if we look at it very close up ? If the latter were true, scientists think, this would lead to deviations from the theory of special relativity formulated by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. Physics Fri, 20 Dec 2013 12:09:44 EDT news306763772 Quantum steps towards the Big Bang ( —Present-day physics cannot describe what happened in the Big Bang. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity fail in this almost infinitely dense and hot primal state of the universe. Only an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity which unifies these two fundamental pillars of physics could provide an insight into how the universe began. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Golm/Potsdam and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have made an important discovery along this route. According to their theory, space consists of tiny "building blocks". Taking this as their starting point, the scientists arrive at one of the most fundamental equations of cosmology, the Friedmann equation, which describes the universe. This shows that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity really can be unified. Physics Tue, 03 Sep 2013 07:00:01 EDT news297409279 Looking at quantum gravity in a mirror Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum physics are expected to merge at the Planck-scale of extremely high energies and on very short distances. At this scale, new phenomena could arise. However, the Planck-scale is so remote from current experimental capabilities that tests of quantum gravity are widely believed to be nearly impossible. Now an international collaboration between the groups of Caslav Brukner and Markus Aspelmeyer at the University of Vienna and Myungshik Kim at Imperial College London has proposed a new quantum experiment using Planck-mass mirrors. Such an experiment could test certain predictions made by quantum gravity proposals in the laboratory. The findings will be published this week in Nature Physics. Physics Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:00:32 EDT news251297445 Holometer experiment to test if the universe is a hologram ( -- Many ideas in theoretical physics involve extra dimensions, but the possibility that the universe has only two dimensions could also have surprising implications. The idea is that space on the ultra-small Planck scale is two-dimensional, and the third dimension is inextricably linked with time. If this is the case, then our three-dimensional universe is nothing more than a hologram of a two-dimensional universe. Physics Thu, 28 Oct 2010 06:40:55 EDT news207451921 Is Everything Made of Mini Black Holes? ( -- In trying to understand how gravity behaves on the quantum scale, physicists have developed a model that has an interesting implication: mini black holes could be everywhere, and all particles might be made of various forms of black holes. Physics Mon, 18 May 2009 09:19:20 EDT news161857121