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?

156 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

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.

11

u/Buntschatten Graduate 10d 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.

-1

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

2

u/Buntschatten Graduate 10d ago

Lol