ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_150307

Universe is a string-net liquid?

The physicist/sci-fi buff in me purrs to read stuff like this:

From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be modelled in a similar way? "Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.

There's even a hunt for an exotic matter green crystal in South America! And people say that physics is boring... ;-)