When beginning my education, I regarded nearly everything as continuous and analog in nature:
- Physical objects could have any mass on a continuous scale
- Light sources could emit any intensity of light on a continuous scale
The more I learn, the more I find what I regarded as continuous is actually discrete:
- Physical objects are composed of discrete numbers of atomic and subatomic particles
- Light sources emit a discrete number of photons
This trend of finding that things are actually discrete seems to be part of unraveling the properties of nature. The further you dig into something, the more you find the basic elements that comprise it.
It seems strange to me that anything could be truly continuous in nature since such a thing could potentially store infinite information. Is there anything in the universe that we know with relative certainty is not discrete?
Edit: This isn't really a duplicate of the question that is linked. That question is essentially asking, "does the Planck scale imply that space is discrete?" This is not the same as "is everything in the universe discrete?" I did not find the answer to my question there as the answers are addressing a different question.
