'Space-Time' -Could It Be a Mirage? New Theory Says "Yes"

'Space-Time' -Could It Be a Mirage? New Theory Says "Yes"

Space-time - that plastic fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - may be no more than a mirage, according to Peter Horava. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity. The focus of last year's Nobel Prize for Physics, graphene, may unlock the solution.

The world's physics community has started using Horava heresy to explain away the twin cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Others are finding that black holes might not behave as we thought. If Horava's idea is right, it could forever change our conception of space and time and lead us to a "theory of everything", applicable to all matter and the forces that act on it.
For decades physicists have been stymied in their efforts to reconcile Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, with quantum mechanics, which describes the sub-atomic world of particles and forces on the smallest scales.
Space and time according to quantum theory are a static backdrop against which particles move. In Einstein's theories, by contrast, not only are space and time inextricably linked, but the resulting space-time is shaped by the matter within it.