Transports spaciaux. 1. What is Space? Is space like a chessboard? Physicists at UCLA set out to design a better transistor and ended up discovering a new way to think about the structure of space.
Space is usually considered infinitely divisible — given any two positions, there is always a position halfway between. But in a recent study aimed at developing ultra-fast transistors using graphene, researchers from the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute show that dividing space into discrete locations, like a chessboard, may explain how point-like electrons, which have no finite radius, manage to carry their intrinsic angular momentum, or "spin. " While studying graphene's electronic properties, professor Chris Regan and graduate student Matthew Mecklenburg found that a particle can acquire spin by living in a space with two types of positions — dark tiles and light tiles.
The particle seems to spin if the tiles are so close together that their separation cannot be detected. Geometry, space-time and consciousness.