Tom,
A few quotes to tease and shake your smooth confidence a tiny bit (cherry picking I admit).
Martin Rees, Former President, The Royal Society: "Einstein's theory treats space and time as smooth and continuous. We know, however, that no material can be chopped into arbitrarily small pieces: eventually, you get down to discrete atoms. Likewise, space itself has a grainy and "quantised" structure--but on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller. We lack a unified understanding of the bedrock of the physical world". "For instance, mathematicians trying to understand why taps drip, or why waves break, don't care that water is H2O. They treat the fluid as a continuum. They use 'emergent' concepts like viscosity and turbulence"
Steve Giddings, Professor of Physics: "If quantum principles govern nature, it seems likely that spacetime arises from more fundamentally quantum structures. This is the theme that spacetime is emergent, perhaps roughly similar to the emergence of fluid behavior from the interactions of atoms". "The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound, and confronts the reality that a clear successor is not yet in sight. Different approaches to the underlying quantum framework exist; some show promise but none yet clearly resolve our decades-old conundrums in black holes and cosmology. The emergence of such a successor is likely to be a key element in the next major revolution in physics"
Carlo Rovelli, Theoretical Physicist: "We will continue to use geometry as a useful branch of mathematics, but is time to abandon the longstanding idea of geometry as the description of physical space. The idea that geometry is the description of physical space is engrained in us, and might sound hard to get rid of it, but it is unavoidable; it is just a matter of time. Better get rid of it soon". "Einstein discovered that the Newtonian space described by geometry is in fact a field like the electromagnetic field, and fields are nicely continuous and smooth only if measured at large scales. In reality, they are quantum entities that are discrete and fluctuating. Therefore the physical space in which we are immersed is in reality a quantum dynamical entity, which shares very little with what we call "geometry". It is a pullulating process of finite interacting quanta. We can still use expressions like "quantum geometry" to describe it"
And finally, even your friend (Et tu, Brute?),
Max Tegmark, Physicist: "This means that today's best theories similarly need a major shakeup, by retiring an incorrect assumption. Which one? Here's my prime suspect: в€ћ". "If space is a true continuum, then to describe even something as simple as the distance between two points requires an infinite amount of information, specified by a number with infinitely many decimal places. In practice, we physicists have never managed to measure anything to more than about 17 decimal places. Yet real numbers with their infinitely many decimals have infested almost every nook and cranny of physics, from the strengths of electromagnetic fields to the wave functions of quantum mechanics: we describe even a single bit of quantum information (qubit) using two real numbers involving infinitely many decimals". "So if we can do without infinity to figure out what happens next, surely nature can too". And I say, Yes We Can!
Regards,
Akinbo
