[hellofunk]

Beautiful stuff, man. One of the more interesting questions I've seen asked in my casual hobby readings lately is: "Is the Universe quantized?" Meaning of course, is there a final limit to how small things get, and, with the passing of time, does it flow freely or pass in very tiny quantized periods?

[dave_sullivan]

Tangentially related, this basically makes the argument that some black holes (like low mass X-ray binaries) are actually societies that have managed to control matter near the planck scale, best read as hard sci-fi: http://accelerating.org/articles/Smart-2011-TranscensionHypo...

[progman]

> is there a final limit to how small things get

AFAIK yes, the limits are known as Planck Constants. It means that we are living in a digital universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant

There are also conjectures about a _holographic_ universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=holographic+uni...

[flatline]

The existence of the Planck length does not imply quantized spacetime, which is still very much an open question in the field of physics. To the best of my knowledge most models still posit a continuous spacetime. cf. https://www.quora.com/Is-time-discrete-or-continuous

[simonh]

I don't see how that would work with length contraction and time dilation. A unit quantum length object in my frame of reference would have different length to one in a frame at motion relative to mine, and time for it would pass at different quantum clock ticks. I don't see how a universe like that could work when it came to interactions between moving particles.

[AnimalMuppet]

You're assuming that the Lorentz contraction applies unchanged as you move to the Planck length. That's not a given.