This story first appeared in International Science Grid This Week on September 16, 2009.
This movie illustrates how excitations of geometry change as dictated by the quantum Einstein equations. Click image to see .mpg version of animatin. Image courtesy Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.
Just one of the things that supercolliders such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron might find is evidence for something called “Quantum Gravity Loops”—which we won’t even try to explain in this short space, but which theoreticians say could explain a lot about the force known as gravity.
What could such things look like?
To try to illustrate the concept, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics made the accompanying movie of “Quantum Spin Dynamics in Loop Quantum Gravity.” It depicts the quantum evolution of geometry in Loop Quantum Gravity, with the colors of the faces of the tetrahedrals indicating where and how much area exists at any given moment.
It’s also pretty cool to watch!
