Markopoulou Kalamara recently accepted a five-year renewable post at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Fotini, whose parents are both sculptors, says, “My strength is to put things together out of nothing, to take this ingredient and another one there and stick something together.” So she started with Penrose’s spin networks, mixed in some LQG anc came up with networks that do not live in space and are not made of matter, but actually give rise to space and matter themselves. Her theory already predicts one of the most distinctive features of General Relativity–light cones, regions of spacetime within which light can reach a particular event, which ensures that cause precedes effect.
The time to verify the theory experimentally is fast approaching. One experiment may be to track gamma-ray photons from billions of light-years away. If spacetime is in fact discrete, as her theory says, then the speed of light should vary slighly with the wavelength. If her causal spin networks theory is correct, it would mean that the universe functions like a giant quantum computer.