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The claim that discretization is not equal to quantization is a key claim and I'm not sure the paper actually proves/shows this. If it turns out that spacetime
by aeternum 5y ago
The claim that discretization is not equal to quantization is a key claim and I'm not sure the paper actually proves/shows this.
If it turns out that spacetime is discrete and not continuous then we should be able to simulate it. The possible states of some chunk of spacetime (given some maximum/known energy) would be non-infinite and even though it might take us years to calculate each time-step, we could still make progress.
I've seen the theory kicked around before, but why couldn't the universe basically consist of plank length sized voxels and a similarly small update timestep? It would still look plenty continuous to us.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIt’s because of the anisotropy. Suppose the universe was a regular grid of voxels. You could run experiments to prove that. I don’t understand the details, but that was Feynman’s counter argument. (See the “messenger lectures” series on YouTube.) If the grid isn’t regular, you run into other problems. But iirc at one point Feynman was toying with the idea that the grid might be randomly distributed.