That's Why Special Relativity is so Special

It seems there's some news from the Big Bang. The recent gamma ray bursts from the bowels of cosmic history (13.1 billion years ago) have given us a bit of experimental evidence to confirm special relativity down to the Planck Scale. Physics World.com reports that the "speed of light does not vary with wavelength down to distance scales below that of the Planck length. They say that this disfavours certain theories of quantum gravity that postulate the violation of Lorentz invariance."

The reason for this is some quantum gravity theories modify special relativity in order to balance the macro with the quantum world. Specifically Quantum Loop Gravity theory takes a hit but others have to do some reconsidering as these data get examined and absorbed into the physics community.

This is cool stuff here, Sam, don't you think? Not only does it add to the discussion and help us whittle down the GUT options but having information like this arrive 'out of the blue' as it were, reminds us that an untold amount of information is coming at us from afar every day.

Who knows what tomorrow brings.