Without getting bogged down in relativity, I now realise that happy place is perpetually beyond my reach.
David Bohm, the inspirational physicist who developed the implications of Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity.
Inflation took the universe from a scale at which quantum mechanics (which is a theory of the very small) dominates proceedings to one at which relativity (a theory of the very large) does so.
By confirming the existence of gravitational waves, it bolsters Einstein's general theory of relativity, which predicts them.
That's why we're stuck using abstract mathematics for the simple reason that our visualisation abilities evolved in a certain environment that just wasn't appropriate for understanding quantum mechanics and general relativity, so we have to get our intuitions from abstract mathematics.So the universe doesn't have an outside It doesn't have an outside or an inside.
Other ground-based missions, too, are on the case.If these efforts ended up unifying quantum mechanics and relativity, that really would be the discovery of the century.
That's big news.Why?Basically, from the time of Einstein's [theory of] general relativity there was no good idea about how quantum mechanics and gravity fit together.
The primordial gravitational waves Dr Kovac and his colleagues have found not only confirm inflation, they may also help physicists forge the long-sought link between quantum theory and relativity, two presently irreconcilable ways of explaining the universe.Gravitational waves are a prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the modern theory of gravity.
That confirms the link between relativity and quantum theory (which no one really doubted).
And by linking gravitational waves with inflation it provides a chink through which physicists can peer to try to solve one of their field's biggest mysteries: why general relativity, which has passed every test applied to it, cannot be reconciled with quantum theory, which has also passed every test applied to it.Quantum theory is the theory of small things.
Together, they developed Dr Ashtekar's idea to show that it implies that space and time are not smooth, as general relativity requires, but come in tiny, distinct chunks.This granularity emerges from what is the most important difference between the two theories.
