Bubbles Of Virtual Space-Time Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 157):

One of the difficulties [for a quantum theory of gravity] concerns the scale of quantum gravitational processes. Because it is such a weak force — by far the weakest of the four forces of nature — gravity does not manifest its quantum nature on the scale of an atom or even an atomic nucleus, where quantum properties of the other forces are dramatically apparent, but only on a scale some twenty powers of ten below this, across distances of less than 10⁻³³ cm. This tiny distance is known as the Planck length, after Max Planck, the originator of the quantum theory. The associated time-scale, which can be regarded as the fundamental quantum unit of time, is the time it would take light to cross such a tiny distance: 10⁻⁴³ sec, the Planck time. 

Some physicists believe that at the Planck length spacetime breaks up and takes on features more akin to those of a foam than a smooth continuum. In particular, "bubbles" of "virtual" spacetime will form and vanish again in much the same way that virtual particles come and go in the vacuum.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Newtonian mechanics, gravity is a force of attraction between particles of matter, but from the perspective of the General Theory of Relativity, gravity is a relation between matter and space-time. In the latter view, the effect of one body on another is not mediated by a force, but by the relative effects of the bodies on the space in which they extend, and on the time in which the processes they mediate unfold.

If gravity is not a force, then the attempt to unify gravity with the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces, using quantum theory, or any other, is a futile exercise.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, a quantum theory of gravity extends the notion of the instantiation from particles to the dimensions by which particles, and the processes they mediate, are measured.

So, on this model, just as virtual particles that mediate processes are momentarily instantiated in (real) space-time, virtual space-time is momentarily instantiated in (real) space-time, as "bubbles" within the smallest intervals of space-time: the Planck length and the Planck time.