army1987 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) - Less Wrong

42 Post author: orthonormal 12 August 2010 01:08AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 January 2012 06:45:25PM 4 points [-]

If time really is discreet or continuous doesn't have any meaning, if no possible experiments can tell the two apart.

Of course, given any experiment, spacetime being discrete on a sufficiently small scale couldn't be detected, but given any scale, a sufficiently precise experiment could tell if spacetime is discrete at that scale. And there's evidence that spacetime is likely not discrete at Planck scale (otherwise sufficiently-high-energy gamma rays would have a nontrivial dependency of speed on energy, which is not what we see in gamma-ray bursts). See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/edsumm/e091119-06.html

Comment author: [deleted] 13 January 2012 08:53:56PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the post and for the very helpful link.