As I notice I sometimes feel as if time is discontinuous it’s like a comic book where each act is planned out and the main character just comes there. Please give an explanation and correct me if I am wrong. Whether it flows as a continuous thing or like a stream of tiny packets of time just like how energy was considered as a continuous flow but then turned out to be a stream of packets of energy known as quantum.
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What is your question here? – Will thorne Feb 20 '22 at 14:26
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1I want to know whether time is continuous or discontinuous. You might think of it as whether it flows as a continuous stream or as a stream of packets say quantum? Like how energy was consider To be flowing continuously but then turned out to be flow of packets of energy called quantum. – Idku Feb 20 '22 at 14:33
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Your question is really too vague to be answered, you haven't specified what observations you are referring to, and you'd need to say "Is time discontinous under Theory X". The best answer to your question is probably that there is no difference because of the Shannon sampling theorem (which is how .wav encodes audio) that says spaced samples in time encodes all the information of a continuous function (in certain conditions). This has been applied to spacetime (see Achim Kempf), and if you want to get philosophical your mind runs on your brain, applying SST implies also hold for you as well. – N A McMahon Feb 20 '22 at 14:52
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I see from you profile that you are a student, that is why I am answering.
Time is something we measure with calibrated clocks, and space is something we measure with calibrated rulers.
When measurements and observations started observation (ignoring sophisticated clocks and rulers) tell us:
The clock time is discontinuous, as it measures seconds.
The space we measure with rulers is continuous, as it is only the experimental error of dividing the meter into subsections the limits how small the interval is.
BUT with the tools of clocks (more sophisticated ones) and rulers there has been a huge amount of observations and measurements and mainstream physics has a number of theories that fit the data and , important. are predictive by mathematics of new data, always assuming that space and time are continuous.
So as far as our current models go, time is continuous because that it the way nature has been described mathematically by mainstream physics, for classical mechanics and for quantum mechanics.
This does not mean that theorists are not exploring the possible quantization of space time, as in loop quantum gravity (at the moment at an exploratory stage).
As a theory LQG postulates that the structure of space and time is composed of finite loops woven into an extremely fine fabric or network. These networks of loops are called spin networks. ...
And maybe more theories will be proposed in the future.
A student has to go through a graduate course of physics to follow this proposal.
What is certain is that our senses are not able to discover proposed quantizations of space time, so your impression has to do with thought patterns, not with physics,
anna v
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No one knows whether time is discrete or continuous. It is even possible that time is not a fundamental attribute of the physical universe at all, but is instead an emergent phenomena that only appears when you have a large population of interacting particles. There are relevant Wikipedia articles on the problem of time and the thermal time hypothesis.
If time is discrete, the “quanta” of time must be so short that you could not possibly notice them. There are a whole set of open questions concerning the perception of time, but they are part of psychology rather than fundamental physics.
gandalf61
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