Is the fabric of the Universe a seething mass of black holes and wormholes?
We may soon be able to venture into this maelstrom in search of the theory of everything, reports Michael Brooks ON YOUR kitchen table are the following implements: a chainsaw, a wooden mallet and a pair of boxing gloves. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use one of these tools to split an atom. It is, of course, a ridiculous assignment, but it would sound like child’s play to researchers studying quantum gravity. They believe that the very fabric of space-time is a seething foam of wormholes and tiny black holes a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. But the experimental tools available to test this idea are absurdly clumsy: the best particle accelerators can barely examine scales a million billion times larger. “Many people have said it’s going to be impossible to test quantum gravity, so there’s no use even thinking about it,” says John Ellis, a theorist at CERN, the Geneva-based European centre for particle physics. But, he says, it’s too important
