Last month I had my first cover story in New Scientist, You Are Made of Spacetime (with additional reporting by Valerie Jamieson).
The story is about some intriguing new ideas coming from the loop quantum gravity community — the rebellious bunch of physicists who don't buy the hype about string theory and still want to look around for alternatives.
Lee Smolin, Fotini Markopoulou, and their collaborators seem to believe that if you follow quantum theory to its ultimate consequences, it will eventually prove that space as we know it is an illusion. Instead, the universe could turn out to be an endless computation process, a network of quantum computers whose nodes would be everywhere and nowhere. And the stuff we are made of — the elementary particles — could be the result of the computer's circuitry being all tangled up into braids. Or dread locks, as I like to think of them.
Lately, Smolin has been in the media a lot, partly because his new book is coming out, "The Trouble with Physics": Time interviewed him for an article entitled The Unraveling of String Theory; Ira Flatow had him on the air together with Brian Greene on Science Friday; and Wired interviewed him, too.
For the record, I don't particularly have an opinion for or against string theory. I have recently covered research both in string theory and in loop quantum gravity.
But what if neither's real?
Has no real mass and yet just has to be.
And Newton's apple simply had to fall.