Present day ... The Crystals, their families, and I shared a wonderful reunion on Sunday as I learned more about my Crystal bloodline and their European roots. They certainly were a colorful group of people coming to the US from the former Bale Settlement in the Ukraine in 1911 - arriving at Ellis Island. Their lives and stories could fill volumes as do the sagas of countless others arriving on these shores from distant lands under various circumstance. My grandfather, Israel, became a seaman in Hamburg, Germany, to secure passage for his wife Bayla and their growing family. My father was the first child born in the US - the 5th of 9 living children. The family was fortunate to have escaped in the years before Hitler came into power.

The essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a gravitational-wave detector in Germany .

Poets have long believed the passage of time to be unavoidable, inexorable and generally melancholic. Quantum mechanics says it is fuzzy, ticking along at minimum intervals within which the notion of time is meaningless. And Craig Hogan claims he can 'see' it in the thus far unexplained noise of a gravitational-wave detector. "It's potentially the most transformative thing I've ever worked on," says Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It's actually a possibility that we can access experimentally the minimum interval of time, which we thought was out of reach."

In a classical view of the world, space and time are smooth. The minimum scales at which, according to quantum mechanics, the smoothness breaks down - the Planck length and time - can be derived from other quantities, but they have not been tested experimentally, nor would they be, given their impossibly small size.

Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea - which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year - would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big).

The predictions are based on a lower-dimensional view of spacetime: two spatial dimensions, plus time. Spacetime would be a plane of waves, traveling at the speed of light. The fundamental fuzziness of the waves, on the order of the Planck length and time, could be amplified in large systems such as gravitational-wave detectors. The third spatial dimension of the macroscopic world would be encoded in information contained in the two-dimensional waves. "It's as if, in the real world, we are living inside a hologram. The illusion is almost perfect. You really need a machine like GEO600 to see it."

Holographic Promise

According to Hogan, the 'holographic' noise is more likely to be seen in certain detectors, because the fuzziness gets translated into noise only in the plane of the underlying wavy two-dimensional fabric of spacetime. GEO600 is less sensitive to gravity waves than are detectors such as those in LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), two similar, large L-shaped detectors in Washington and Louisiana. But Hogan says GEO600 is more sensitive to holographic noise, because its power is locked in a beamsplitter that amplifies the peculiar transverse quality of the fuzziness.

The idea for an essentially holographic Universe has gained traction in recent years, as string theorists have found ways to trim the 10 dimensions that their theories call for. A decade ago, Juan Maldacena, now of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, put forward the idea that most of the 10 dimensions can be reduced when the information is encoded, like a hologram, in three or four basic dimensions.

The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat, Germany's Bild newspaper reported on Saturday. The daily printed three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility."

The plans, published ahead of the 70th anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" or the Nazi pogrom that was a harbinger of the Holocaust, also include a crematorium and a "L. Keller" - an abbreviation for "Leichenkeller" or corpse cellar. A drawing of the building for Auschwitz's main gate was also found in the documents that Bild said were believed to have been discovered when a Berlin flat was cleaned out. The mass-circulation newspaper quoted Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, as saying the blueprints offered "authentic evidence of the systematically planned genocide of European Jews."

There were mass killings of about one million Jews before the Nazi's "Final Solution" was formulated in late 1941. The decision to kill Europe's 11 million Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. A copy of the minutes, known as the "Wannsee Protocol," is one of the most important documents from the war. The newly found Auschwitz blueprints are dated October 23 1941 and could offer historians earlier evidence of Nazi plans to kill Jews on a mass scale, Bild said. "These documents reveal that everyone who had even anything remotely to do with the planning and construction of the concentration camp must have know that people were to be gassed to death in assembly-line fashion," Bild wrote. "The documents refute once and for all claims by those who deny the Holocaust even took place," it added.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest -- at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there. Auschwitz I was set up in May 1940 in an old Polish army barracks. The first victims were gassed in September 1941. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, opened in October 1941. Four large gas chambers were added to the camp in January 1942.

Kristallnacht - literally "Crystal Night" or the "Night of Broken Glass", was a pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9-10, 1938. On a single night, 92 Jews were murdered and 25,000-30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. It is often called Novemberpogrom or Reichspogromnacht in German. The Nazis coordinated an attack on Jewish people and their property in Germany and German-controlled lands as a part of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic policy.