resolution, but reality is a quadrillion times better - a hundred
trillion dots per inch. A collaboration between Fermilab scientists
and a hundreds of meters of laser may have found the very pixels of
reality, grains of spacetime one tenth of a femtometer across.
The GEO600 system is armed with six hundred meters of laser tube,
which sounds like enough to equip an entire Star War, but these
lasers are for detection, not destruction. GEO600's length means it
can measure changes of one part in six hundred million, accurate
enough to detect even the tiniest ripples in space time - assuming
it isn't thrown off by somebody sneezing within a hundred meters or
the wrong types of cloud overhead (seriously). The problem with such
an incredibly sensitive device is just that - it's incredibly sensitive.
The interferometer staff constantly battle against unwanted
aberration, and were struggling against a particularly persistent
signal when Fermilab Professor Craig Hogan suggested the problem
wasn't with their equipment but with reality itself. The quantum
limit of reality, the Planck length, occurs at a far smaller length
scale than their signal - but according to Hogan, this literal
ultimate limit of tininess might be scaled up because we're all
holograms.
Obviously.
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