Are space and time discrete or continuous?

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And if they are discrete, what are the “spaces” between the elemental units of space and time? What is the fundamental unit of spacetime? Is it discrete or contunous and if it is discrete what would its aforementioned “spaces” be?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Basic answer is that the universe is believed to be quantum in nature. In very ELI5 terms, it is not infinitely divisible. In slightly not so ELI5 terms, as we deal with the very small, the classical ideas of space and time no longer hold.

At a quantum level “where is x” and is no longer a perfectly answerable question. This is pretty hard to get an intuitive sense of. Your question of “what is between” doesn’t really make sense because it isn’t even possible to say where an object is and isn’t at any particular “moment of time” – it appears probabilistic. So even the idea of “between” really cannot be described.

Perhaps a more fair description is that we don’t exactly know. At the levels we are currently able to experiment and observe with, the evidence is that the universe is discretized but there are theories out there, string theory for example, that might have a more fundamental explanation that could be more “continuous”.

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