Our very first blog post was about an experiment showing the universe is "pixellated" - what you'd expect if we are, in fact, living in a giant hologram. But:
[A] European satellite that should be able to measure these small scales hasn't found any quantum fuzziness at all, contradicting the interpretation of the GEO600 results and indicating that the pixellation of spacetime, if it exists, is considerably smaller than predicted.
By examining the polarisation of gamma-ray bursts as they reach Earth, we should be able to detect this graininess, as the polarisation of the photons that arrive here is affected by the spacetime that they travel through. The grains should twist them, changing the direction in which they oscillate so that they arrive with the same polarisation. Also, higher energy gamma rays should be twisted more than lower ones.
However, the satellite detected no such twisting -- there were no differences in the polarisation between different energies found to the accuracy limits of the data, which are 10,000 times better than any previous readings. That means that any quantum grains that exist would have to measure 10^-48 metresor smaller.
So if the universe IS a hologram, it's a fine-grained one. Assuming, of course,
that nature doesn't lie to us.
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