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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (796)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: kilobug 12 January 2012 04:48:40PM 1 point [-]

It could be like that something moving at 3/4 c will have, on each Planck time, a 3/4 chance of moving of one Planck length, and a 1/4 chance of not moving at all. But that's how I understand it from a computer scientist point of view, it may not be how physicists really see it.

But I think the core reason is that since no signal can spread faster than c, no signal can cross more than one Planck length over a Planck time, so a difference of less than a Planck time can never be detected. Since it cannot be detected, since there is no experimental setting that would differ if something happened a fraction of Planck time earlier, the question has no meaning.

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

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.