Assistant Professor of Physics Seth Major presented a paper at Loops '05, the annual international meeting on non-perturbative/background independent quantum gravity. It took place in October at the Albert-Einstein-Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and commemorated the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein's death. Major's paper was titled "A Discrete Machian Model" which is a phenomenological theory of discrete space.
He presented a model which exhibits potential observable effects from discrete space. For hundreds of years physicists have assumed that space is continuous. Recent results in quantum gravity suggest that this is not necessarily so. If space is discrete (e.g. you cannot observe any area, only a finite set of possible areas) then there must
be a way to observe this discreteness. The work is a step in the direction of formulating a more mature set of model theories which bridge the gap between developments in the deep structure of spacetime and experimental or observational work.
