This Spacetime Quasicrystal Could Solve Physicists’ Biggest Problem

TL;DR

Researchers at Perimeter Institute propose spacetime is a quasicrystal — a never-exactly-repeating pattern that could bridge Einstein's relativity and quantum physics.

Key Points

• 1.Regular crystal lattices fail as spacetime models because they break Einstein's relativity: a moving observer would see the lattice length-contracted, making motion detectable — which contradicts physics.
• 2.Quasicrystals solve this by having patterns that never exactly repeat (like Penrose tilings), avoiding the directional bias of regular lattices while still providing discrete structure at small scales.
• 3.The proposed spacetime quasicrystal extends into extra spatial dimensions, potentially linking the size of the universe to particle masses and the strength of gravity.
• 4.Sabine rates the paper 3/10 on the "bullshit meter" — genuinely creative and new, but far from a complete theory since it doesn't yet explain how quantum particles would actually move through the quasicrystal.