Gravitational waves cannot exist unless space and time are flexible:

https://soundcloud.com/cbc-fresh-air...e-2616/s-oIVP6
Neil Turok (1:28): "Einstein pictured space and time themselves as a flexible substance..."

Yet clever Einsteinians suggest that space and time are not flexible:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"...says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

Spacetime is not just not flexible - actually it does not exist and should be retired (LIGO's gravitational waves are the hoax of the century):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE
Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:11): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time [...] The stumbling block lies with their conflicting views of space and time. As seen by quantum theory, space and time are a static backdrop against which particles move. In Einstein's theories, by contrast, not only are space and time inextricably linked, but the resulting space-time is moulded by the bodies within it. [...] Something has to give in this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the smart money says that it's relativity that will be the loser."

https://indico.cern.ch/event/375104/...public-session
On Saturday July 2nd, 2016, a session for the General Public entitled "Cordes & Maths" ("Mathematics of Superstrings") is organized at Collège de France, in collaboration with the séminaire Poincaré and the Clay Mathematics Institute. 16h45: Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS, Princeton): "Physics and Mathematics for the End of Spacetime"

Pentcho Valev