From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Wed Mar 19 1997 - 14:26:54 MST
---JKC
Mass, energy, momentum, electric charge, spin, charm, and color, are all
digital quantities. It's true that nobody has found a quantum theory of
gravity yet, but there is not a Physicist alive who doesn't think we need one.
General Relativity is not compatible with Quantum theory and breaks down
completely when things get smaller than the Planck Length or less the
Planck Time. The idea of continuous spacetime is looking increasingly suspect.
---JKC
I agree that our best equations to date produce some pretty bizarre
consequences for arbitrary real-valued inputs. I am not yet prepared,
though, to attribute those failures to our mistaken assumption of
continuity rather than simply to the incompleteness of the equations.
When our explanations of nature imply consequences we have not observed,
I am far more willing to suspect or explanations than to assume that
nature actually has some unobserved property. Of course, both are
probably true, and I'd be delighted to discover either one; I'm just
more likely to suspect the theorists' errors than the experimenters'.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
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