… 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

* Slashdot | Scientists Complete Universe Millennium Simulation

New research suggests that the early universe was a hot, dense liquid made of basic atomic particles, overturning the widely held belief that fiery gas existed immediately after the “big bang” that created the cosmos.

Related:
* CNN: Scientists: Early universe didn’t blow so much as flow
* USAToday.com: Picking apart the ‘Big Bang’ brings a big mystery
* Slashdot.org: Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid

Science News : Early universe may have been fluid