Quanta of energy have to do with the wavelengths of light emitted from, say, an electron jumping to a lower energy level. That is what is quantized, and it comes from the boundary conditions of the energy levels themselves. I was making a comment about how many people have speculated that quantization extends to space-time itself, that we move through the universe in a quantized way; that is what a discontinuous universe would look like. This new research suggests that there aren't boundary constraints on space-time, apparently.
Ah, I see. "Smooth, not foamy" makes quite a bit more sense in this context, actually. I'm just not sure how much I want to hinge a change in our entire physical worldview on the fact that some particles acted like they were on pavement rather than gravel, as it were.
- "If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved," study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement.
This is extremely interesting, though. Planck's constant has long been thought they be-all end-all, I believe. Perhaps nuts to that.