Related papers: On the detectability of quantum spacetime foam wit…
A recent paper (gr-qc/9909017) criticizes our work on the structure of spacetime foam. Its authors argue that the quantum uncertainty limit for the position of the quantum clock in a gedanken timing experiment, obtained by Wigner and used…
One aspect of the quantum nature of spacetime is its "foaminess" at very small scales. Many models for spacetime foam are defined by the accumulation power $\alpha$, which parameterizes the rate at which Planck-scale spatial uncertainties…
The expectation that it should not be possible to gain experimental insight on the structure of space-time at Planckian distance scales has been recently challenged by several studies. With respect to space-time fluctuations, one of the…
If spacetime undergoes quantum fluctuations, an electromagnetic wavefront will acquire uncertainties in direction as well as phase as it propagates through spacetime. These uncertainties can show up in interferometric observations of…
By analyzing a gedanken experiment designed to measure the distance $l$ between two spatially separated points, we find that this distance cannot be measured with uncertainty less than $(ll_P^2)^{1/3}$, considerably larger than the Planck…
More than 65 years ago, John Wheeler suggested that quantum uncertainties of the metric would be of order one at the Planck scale, leading to large fluctuations in spacetime geometry and topology, which he termed "spacetime foam." In this…
Due to quantum fluctuations, spacetime is probably ``foamy'' on very small scales. We propose to detect this texture of spacetime foam by looking for core-halo structures in the images of distant quasars. We find that the Very Large…
Astronomical observations of distant quasars may be important to test models for quantum gravity, which posit Planck-scale spatial uncertainties ('spacetime foam') that would produce phase fluctuations in the wavefront of radiation emitted…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity may necessitate a drastic modification of our perception of space-time, by giving it a foamy structure at distances comparable to the Planck length. It is argued in this essay that the experimental…
The extreme smallness of both the Planck length, on the one side, and the ratio of the gravitational to the electrical forces between, say, two electrons, on the other side has led to a widespread belief that the realm of quantum gravity is…
Plausibly spacetime is "foamy" on small distance scales, due to quantum fluctuations. We elaborate on the proposal to detect spacetime foam by looking for seeing disks in the images of distant quasars and AGNs. This is a null test in the…
Spacetime is composed of a fluctuating arrangement of bubbles or loops called spacetime foam, or quantum foam. We use the holographic principle to deduce its structure, and show that the result is consistent with gedanken experiments…
The recent paper gr-qc/9909017 criticizes the limit on the measurability of distances that was derived by Salecker and Wigner in the 1950s. If justified, this criticism would have important implications for all the recent studies that have…
Using a \emph{gedanken} experiment providing presumably a minimal inaccuracy the uncertainty contributions to the space-time measurement are precisely evaluated for clock and mirror respectively. The resulting expression of minimal…
Quantum fluctuations can endow spacetime with a foamy structure. In this review article we discuss our various proposals to observationally constrain models of spacetime foam. One way is to examine if the light wave-front from a distant…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity will very likely require modification of our classical perception of space-time, perhaps by giving it a 'foamy' structure at scales of order the Planck length. This is expected to modify the…
At Planck-scale, spacetime is "foamy" due to quantum fluctuations predicted by quantum gravity. Here we consider the possibility of using spacetime foam-induced phase incoherence of light from distant galaxies and gamma-ray bursters to…
I develop a phenomenological approach to the description of the noise levels that the space-time foam of quantum gravity could induce in modern gravity-wave detectors. Various possibilities are considered, including white noise and…
I propose a phenomenological description of space-time foam and discuss the experimental limits that are within reach of forthcoming experiments.
All existing experimental results are currently interpreted using classical geometry. However, there are theoretical reasons to suspect that at a deeper level, geometry emerges as an approximate macroscopic behavior of a quantum system at…