Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjeetgill | Hacker News Reader

Do we know that for certain? We think space is still continuous right? So there's an infinity between any two points.

Even with all the plank-length stuff, they're not snapped to a plank grid right?

I'm genuinely asking: my level of knowledge is YouTube.

Yes actually, particle motion is quantized on the planck scale, that is, snapped to the grid. That's why it's called quantum physics. Modern theories even have it that there are no particles, rather, excitations of various quantum fields.

So what we consider a discrete photon particle with a location (x,y) would actually not be an individual particle and would be more like:

  electromagnetic_field[y][x] = "excited"

in a big (presumably infinite) grid.

Quantum fields are mathematical tools, they are not what the universe is made out of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com