Can the way the universe behaves at the tiniest scales be recreated in the laboratory?
Physicist Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland in College Park has a recipe for cooking up a lab-scale version of a "quantum foam", the choppy substance that constitutes space-time in some theories of quantum gravity.
According to these theories, space-time may appear smooth and curved, but zoom in, and it is actually made of virtual black holes, each just 10^-35 metres wide, which flit in and out of existence.
To mimic this structure, Smolyaninov suggests exploiting "critical opalescence". At certain temperatures, some combinations of fluids can roil and form a rough mixture of separate patches. As photons travel at different speeds through each fluid, light is refracted, or bent, at the boundaries between the patches and the mixture ends up opaque.
To read the rest of the article, click here.