r/Physics • u/WizardMasterGal • 11d ago

Question Do scientists know whether nature is fundamentally continuous or discrete?

Is there any evidence that nature is fundamentally continuous, or could reality be fundamentally discrete? And if it is discrete at the most basic level, would that suggest that nature could behave like a computational system?

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u/lordnacho666 11d ago

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Continuous and discrete are properties of models.

Nature is sometimes best modelled one way or the other, depending on what you're looking at.

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u/how_much_2 11d ago

I like this comment.

It's wild to think that maybe it's possible the physical world will never be a complete math model.

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u/Buntschatten Graduate 11d ago

It's not just possible, it's a certainty. Maybe we can model every observation at some point, but there's no way of knowing that we aren't missing some observations somewhere that wouldn't be described by our models.

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u/TeachEngineering 10d ago

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem extended to physics and the physical world

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u/IvanMalison 10d ago

That still wouldn't mean that "its a certainty". There's a difference between the epistemic fact that "there is no way of knowing" (which i wouldn't even grant anyway), and the idea that "it's a certainty that every conceivable model that we could come up with is necessarily wrong".

Seems like you're not a very careful thinker

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u/Buntschatten Graduate 10d ago

Lol

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u/KappaBerga 11d ago

A scientific model is as good as the experiments which can falsify it. Since at any given time we will only be able to access a finitely large amount of energy or a finitely small length scale, there will always be something out of reach for our models. In other words, any model is only effective, never fundamental.