ABrooks 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: [deleted] 13 January 2012 10:12:22PM 0 points [-]

I think pragmatism is a fine approach here, but could you clarify for me what your think the answer to my question is exactly? If it's not meaningful to ask whether or not there are indivisible and discontinuous units, then is the answer to my question "Does QM's claims about Planck time imply that time is discontinuous?" simply "No" because QM says nothing meaningful about the question one way or the other?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 January 2012 11:11:58PM 4 points [-]

In ‘pure’ QM (without gravity), the Planck length has no special significance, and spacetime is assumed to be continuous. But we know that QM as we know it must be an approximation because it disagrees with GR (and/or vice versa), and the ‘correct’ theory of quantum gravity might predict weird things at the Planck scale. So far, most proposed theories of quantum gravity have little more predictive power than “The woman down the street is a witch; she did it”, though some do predict stuff such as the dispersion of gamma rays I've mentioned elsewhere.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 January 2012 10:22:57PM *  0 points [-]

is the answer to my question "Does QM's claims about Planck time imply that time is discontinuous?" simply "No" because QM says nothing meaningful about the question one way or the other?

We're trying to dissolve the question by pointing out that there exists a third option besides "continuous" or "discontinuous". So the answer to "Does QM's claims about Planck time imply that time is discontinuous?" would be "No, but neither is it continuous, but a third thing that tends to confuse people."

Edit: retracted because I don't think this is helpful.