this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
262 points (89.7% liked)

Science Memes

9989 readers
2004 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.


Sister Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 105 points 2 months ago (17 children)

My only guess as to what this could mean is that since quantum mechanics is quantum, i.e. discrete, the universe therefore cannot be continuous as the reals are. But this is a category error. Just because you could never find an object that is, say, exactly pi meters long, does not mean that the definition of pi is threatened. There's nothing infinite that we can observe, but infinity is still a useful concept. And it works both ways; just because quantum mechanics is our best model of the universe doesn't mean the universe is therefore quantum. 150 years ago everyone believed the universe was like a big clockwork mechanism, perfectly deterministic, because Newtonian physics are deterministic. And who knows, maybe they were right, and we just don't have the framework to understand it so we have a nondeterministic approximation!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (16 children)

We could make an object that is exactly pi meters long. Make a circle of 1 meter in diameter, and then straighten it out. We would not be able to measure the length more accurately than we can calculate it (that might be the largest understatement ever) but to the tolerance with which we could make a 1 meter diameter circle, you should have the same tolerance to the circumference being pi.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)

No, by our current understanding there is no length smaller than a Planck length, and any distance must therefore be divisible by an integer. That is, the length is made up of discrete quanta. Pi, or any other irrational number, is by definition not divisible by an integer, or it would be a ratio, making it rational. This has nothing to do with the accuracy or precision of our measures.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Mmmmmm don’t know about that.

The Planck length is the minimum resolvable accuracy of the universe. That doesn’t mean it’s a building block like the electron is.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)