"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity - one the most pressing challenges to modern physics."
https://www.newscientist.com/article...of-space-time/

To "rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another" means to declare two things:

1. The premise from which spacetime has been derived, Einstein's constant-speed-of-light postulate, is false.

2. Gravitational waves (ripples in spacetime) don't exist - LIGO folks are fraudsters.

Petr Horava is not so brave. Perhaps he doesn't want to rip spacetime apart anymore and sings dithyrambs to LIGO's victorious godfathers. His brother string theorist Steve Giddings once wanted to retire spacetime but now believes that the ripples in spacetime are worth living for:

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..."x https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25477

"In celebration of Einstein's birthday, physicists reflect on the German-born scientist's work and its impact on the field and on everyday life. "We have good reason to believe general relativity is not a complete theory and, in particular, that it's going to break down in the context of describing black holes," said UCSB physics professor Steve Giddings. "That's very much an important problem in physics today. "The direct observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes really constrains the possible departures from general relativity that we know are there and limits where modifications can be made," he continued. "But the discovery is still spectacular and its announcement was one of those moments in science that you live for." http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/016562...ein-revolution

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