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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  4333 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Discontinuous Mind

Quanta of energy have to do with the wavelengths of light emitted from, say, an electron jumping to a lower energy level. That is what is quantized, and it comes from the boundary conditions of the energy levels themselves. I was making a comment about how many people have speculated that quantization extends to space-time itself, that we move through the universe in a quantized way; that is what a discontinuous universe would look like. This new research suggests that there aren't boundary constraints on space-time, apparently.





user-inactivated  ·  4333 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ah, I see. "Smooth, not foamy" makes quite a bit more sense in this context, actually. I'm just not sure how much I want to hinge a change in our entire physical worldview on the fact that some particles acted like they were on pavement rather than gravel, as it were.

    "If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved," study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement.

This is extremely interesting, though. Planck's constant has long been thought they be-all end-all, I believe. Perhaps nuts to that.

b_b  ·  4333 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, very interesting result, but just one result, nonetheless. Hopefully this is an experiment that can be repeated relatively easily.