Loop quantum gravity can be visualised, as its name suggests, as a mesh of loops.
If true, that is a spanner in the works for those designing quantum gravity.
Loop quantum gravity, as this rival is known, was dreamed up in 1986 by Abhay Ashtekar, of Pennsylvania State University.
Indeed, theorists working on loop quantum gravity think that matter itself is merely the result of twisting and braiding ribbons of space-time.
Another way of placing constraints on quantum gravity has been found by Ted Jacobson and his colleagues at the University of Maryland, College Park.
But both it and loop quantum gravity harbour unresolved problems.
Loop quantum gravity is, in the jargon, background independent.
This could be achieved by finding which one is right and which one is wrong, by finding that both string theory and loop quantum gravity are wrong and a third theory is right, or by finding that the two theories can be unified.
To fold gravity into quantum mechanics, they argue, gravity, like electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, needs to be quantized, to be reduced to the exchange of special particles.
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And we might be provided with clues that reveal the trail to unraveling the ultimate holy grail of fundamental particle physics -- a quantum theory of gravity.
With a quantum theory of gravity, we may be able to trace the Big Bang expansion back to its very beginning, and understand precisely how our universe arose, presumably from nothing.
However, of the four fundamental forces, gravity is by far the weakest, and it took until 2002 before gravity's quantum nature was proven.
Now a team of researchers from the Vienna University of Technology have refined the technique at the ILL to examine and exploit gravity's quantum ways.
These quantum jumps can test Newton's theory of gravity - and any variations from it - with unprecedented precision.
Einstein's framework for his theory of gravity, for example, is incompatible with quantum theory, which explains how nature works at an atomic and subatomic level.
My paper has quantum theory in mind in relation to relativity, mass and gravity.
His main characters include G, the strength of gravity, h, Planck's constant, which governs the quantum nature of reality at small scales, e, the charge of the electron, and c, the speed of light itself.
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