A strange"cosmic glitch" in gravity could explain the universe's weird behavior on the largest scales, researchers suggest.
In a study published March 20 in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, researchers described this discrepancy as a"cosmic glitch," and they say their proposed fix for it could help us understand some of the universe's most enduring mysteries. "The glitch is the smoking gun for a fundamental violation of Einstein's equivalence principle , which could point to radically different pictures for quantum gravity, the Big Bang, or black holes," Afshordi added.
Yet some discrepancies between theory and reality remain. First, attempts to scale down general relativity to describe how gravity operates on quantum scales transform its usually robust equations into incomprehensible nonsense. "The modification is very simple: We assume the universal constant of gravitation is different on cosmological scales, compared to smaller scales," Afshordi said."We call this a cosmic glitch."
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