Yeah, I simplified the message a bit after reading the page and the blog post on it. It cut out some of the more radical quantum foam theories, and I kinda liked those myself.
The qualifiers, “not that” and “pretty darned” left some openings for some less dramatic theories to still be viable, but a number of the popular media accounts of quantum foam had it as this mysterious bubbly stuff (such is the nature and danger of analogies)… and it’s good to see some nice telescope work done to put some constraints upon what’s only been done theoretically and mathematically.
I appreciate the times such things happens for, as much as I like the precision available to mathematics, the occasional reality check keeps theoretical physics from going too off the deep end.
[I’m all for theoretical physics, but the recent push to remove the need for evidence from the field altogether has had me concerned. Hopefully this discovery will help keep that from happening]