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observers
create
the universe.
    I noted that the $10,000 prize for the Young Researchers Competition in Physics was awarded at the conference to Fotini Markopoulou, a loop quantum gravity researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. In her winning paper she argued that cosmology must describe the universe as seen by observers who are stuck inside it.
In the end
,
it seems
,
the more we pursue the deepest mysteries of the cosmos
, I wrote,
the closer we come to ourselves.
    I clicked “Send.”
    Phil emailed back right away. He explained that
Scientific American
had a similar piece in the works about the anthropic principle, but they were interested in Fotini Markopoulou. “What do you know about loop quantum gravity?” he asked.
    What did I know about loop quantum gravity? Approximately … nothing. I called my father and read him the email.
    â€œOh, well,” he said. “You tried.”
    â€œTried?” I said. “This isn’t over. This is our one shot!”
    â€œOkay, but—”
    â€œWe have one night to learn loop quantum gravity.”
    â€œYou’re joking,” he said. “Why one night?”
    â€œIf I don’t write back tomorrow, it will seem like I took the time to look this stuff up. It has to look like I know it off the top of my head. We don’t have much time—start reading and call me back in a few hours!”
    I absorbed what I was reading as best I could. Loop quantum gravity was an attempt to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics—the seemingly correct yet mutually exclusive pillars of modern physics. Such unification is the key to the origin of the universe, that placeholder on the map where nothing turns into something, where the H-state becomes the world.
Need quantum gravity to understand singularities
, I had written in my notebook.
To understand nothing.
Loop quantum gravity’s approach was to zoom in on space, peering down to nature’s smallest scale to see what dragons lurk there.
    That nature even
has
a smallest scale was pretty hard to grasp. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion that if I were to zoom in on some modest stretch of space, magnifying it and peering into increasingly smaller depths, I would eventually reach a place further from me in scale than the entire observable universe—and yet, somehow, right here on the tip of my finger. A universe larger than the universe, sitting in the palm of my hand. Only you can’t keep zooming forever. At a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter, you hit the bottom of reality. Sorry, folks, you’ve reached the end—the teeny-tiny edge of the universe.
    Space ends there, at the so-called Planck scale, because that’s where quantum mechanics and general relativity join forces to bend spacetime until it breaks. The sheer density of gravity produces a sea of black holes, which Wheeler dubbed “spacetime foam.”
    It was a counterintuitive notion—usually when you’re dealing with small things, gravity is negligible. Gravity acts on mass, and you need a lot of it before you notice its pull. Even at the human scale, gravity is pretty insignificant. A refrigerator magnet can overpower the gravitational force of the entire planet just to lift a paper clip. At the scale of protons and electrons, gravity barely exists at all.
    But keep zooming in and, strangely, things start to turn around. The laws of quantum mechanics contain a loophole that allows large fluctuations of energy to burst forth from the vacuum, provided they don’t stick around too long. At increasingly shorter time scales, energy blinks in and out of existence in the form of fleeting, or “virtual,” particles. The more localized the virtual particle, the greater its momentum, and the greater its momentum, the larger its energy. Thanks to E = mc 2 , more energy means more mass. So as you look at