The End of Space-Time?

“Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory—inspired by pencil lead—that could make it all very simple.” The New Scientist reports: “Something has to give in this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the smart money says that it’s relativity that will be the loser. So [Petr] Horava [of the University of California Berkeley] began looking for ways to tweak Einstein’s equations. He found inspiration in an unlikely place: the physics of condensed matter, including the material of the moment—pencil lead.”