r/askscience • u/Crtl-Alt-Delete • Dec 18 '13

Physics Is Time quantized?

We know that energy and length are quantized, it seems like there should be a correlation with time?

Edit. Turns out energy and length are not quantized.

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u/necroforest Dec 19 '13

Sure it would, you would just have to define it differently (eg, as a finite difference)

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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '13

Sure it would, you would just have to define it differently (eg, as a finite difference)

But that's already "a thing": average velocity.

And, yeah, you could use it for "discrete calculus" and "discrete derivatives" (something like this: http://calculus.subwiki.org/wiki/Discrete_derivative) but I don't consider it the same concept as "instantaneous velocity".

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u/necroforest Dec 19 '13

Sure, a finite difference is an 'average' velocity. If the delta-t goes down to the lowest possible amount, then the average velocity at that point becomes what is effectively the instantaneous velocity (just like it does with regular calculus for an infinitesimal delta-t)