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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

I only studied through an undergrad modern physics level. Is this talking about planck length or something else?

No, it's talking about optical resolution. If you were to make an image of the universe surrounding our Solar System and galaxy, there's a maximum number of pixels that you could zoom in and see before everything gets fuzzy due to spacetime warping the path of the photons as they made progress through the universe. (Like taking a photo through frosted glass, except the frosting is much finer here.)

It is talking about planck-scale stuff though. And the effect is pure conjecture.

Yeah, if you mean it that way then the conjectured phenomenon providing the fuzzing seems to be basically at-or-around Plank-scale stuff which arises from having the Heisenberg uncertainty principle around (because there's a hard boundary on the precision with which a process could demonstrate that space is empty, so in practice, it's not strictly empty, just a close approximation that's can have quantum fluctuations).

Yes, indirectly: At the Planck scale (10-35m), a quantum foam of virtual particles appears and annihilates itself. While these particles are ephemeral, for a moment, they are there, with mass.

Mass affects spacetime, bending it slightly, changing the path of anything travelling through that spacetime. Think gravitational lensing, though on a much smaller scale.

Light travelling long enough, through enough foamy roil, will deflect a little, randomly. The cumulative effect would be to "blur" any images of sufficiently distant objects.

Or so the idea goes....

Here is a link to the paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.04996.pdf.

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