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

No one knows. This is one of the fundamental questions that physics and the Standard Model still can’t answer. Anyone who is able to answer that question will be placed up with Einstein and Newton and will win the Nobel Prize.

We have good reasons to think that the fundamental units of space time may be discrete (or quantized, as physicists like to say), but we also have good reasons to think otherwise.

The biggest reason to think that spacetime might be quantized is that several very thorny math problems with our current models of physics (such as the prediction of a singularity of infinite density in the center of a black hole) vanish if space has a fundamental size limit. Quantization of energy was how we solved a similar problem back in the late 1800s/early 1900s, known as the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and led to the development of quantum mechanics.

However, while we have mathematical reasons to believe that time and space are discrete, we don’t have any actual physical evidence for it. Personally I believe that spacetime is discrete, but we don’t know.

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