… For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.” …

• New Scientist: Our world may be a giant hologram – 15 January 2009

Physicist may have finally cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has befuddled physicists for the past 40 years, according to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, which concludes that that an outside observer can never lose objects down a black hole.Case Western Reserve University physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss came to this conclusion after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes.

“It’s complicated and very complex,” noted the researchers, regarding both the general problem and their particular approach to try to solve it.

The question that the physicists set out to solve is: “what happens once something collapses into a black hole?”

• Black hole information loss paradox cracked | Press Esc
• The Black Hole Information Loss Problem