Is Space Pixelated? The Quest for Quantum Gravity
Sand dunes seen from afar seem smooth and unwrinkled, like silk sheets spread across the desert. But a closer inspection reveals much more. As you approach the dunes, you may notice ripples in the sand. Touch the surface and you would find individual grains. The same is true for digital images: zoom far enough into an apparently perfect portrait and you will discover the distinct pixels that make the picture.
The universe itself may be similarly pixelated. Scientists such as Rana Adhikari, professor of physics at Caltech, think the space we live in may not be perfectly smooth but rather made of incredibly small discrete units. “A spacetime pixel is so small that if you were to enlarge things so that it becomes the size of a grain of sand, then atoms would be as large as galaxies,” he says.
Adhikari and scientists around the world are on the hunt for this pixelation because it is a prediction of quantum gravity, one of the deepest physics mysteries of our time. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories, including string theory, that seeks to unify the macroscopic world of gravity, governed by general relativity, with the microscopic world of quantum physics. At the core of the mystery is the question of whether gravity, and the spacetime it inhabits, can be “quantized,” or broken down into individual components, a hallmark of the quantum world.
