::Shrug:: There’s something important about the Planck distance, but I don’t know enough physics to be able to say much more. Like Hawking radiation, It’s something that only crops up when you start trying to do ‘quantum gravity’.
It’s tempting to imagine that the universe is something like the “Game Of Life” but with Planck sized cells, but what little I know about string theory makes this idea seem extremely naive. (And anyway, space could be both discrete and infinite.)
IANAPhysicist, but I’m fairly sure that space and time are entirely continuous in standard QM or QFT, though they are discrete in loop quantum gravity and possibly other theories of QG.
Standard QFT doesn’t have discrete space and QCD may make sense with continuum of space-time, but models with a Landau pole, like QED and the standard model, don’t make sense at small length scales. The length at which the Landau pole appears in QED is smaller than the Planck length, so no one cares about it, since they expect bad things to happen already at the Planck scale.
I don’t think you’re right… isn’t it broken down into plank lengths or something?
::Shrug:: There’s something important about the Planck distance, but I don’t know enough physics to be able to say much more. Like Hawking radiation, It’s something that only crops up when you start trying to do ‘quantum gravity’.
It’s tempting to imagine that the universe is something like the “Game Of Life” but with Planck sized cells, but what little I know about string theory makes this idea seem extremely naive. (And anyway, space could be both discrete and infinite.)
IANAPhysicist, but I’m fairly sure that space and time are entirely continuous in standard QM or QFT, though they are discrete in loop quantum gravity and possibly other theories of QG.
Standard QFT doesn’t have discrete space and QCD may make sense with continuum of space-time, but models with a Landau pole, like QED and the standard model, don’t make sense at small length scales. The length at which the Landau pole appears in QED is smaller than the Planck length, so no one cares about it, since they expect bad things to happen already at the Planck scale.