Are there fundamental units of space-time at some unfathomably tiny scale?
tells us that what we experience as the forces of nature really come in discrete, tiny chunks, known as quanta., gravity is a force and all forces are quantized, maybe space-time itself comes in discrete little blocks. Maybe there are fundamental units of space-time at some unfathomably tiny scale.One of the most annoying things that general relativity and quantum mechanics disagree about is the role that space-time plays in the physics.
So, in our quest to unite quantum mechanics with gravity, maybe we should take Einstein's theory at face value. If gravity simplythe mechanics of space-time, then to seek a quantum theory of gravity, we really need to seek a quantum theory of space-time. If we can crack that quantization, then by default, we'll end up with aThis is the approach known as loop quantum gravity.
What does it mean to quantize space-time? It means there's a fundamental unit, a discrete chunk, of space-timey-ness that sits at some imperceptibly small scale. If you were to zoom in to this screen, the smooth curves and clean edges of the letters would be revealed as a vast number of little squares — pixels.
In much the same way, if you were to zoom in to space-time, you would see that time doesn't advance into the future continuously but in quick little tick-tick-ticks of a discrete clock. When you move, it wouldn't be a smooth motion; it would just consist of stuttering steps from one space-time pixel to another.
The biggest benefit of this quantization of space-time is that singularities simply go away. Singularities appear in Einstein's general relativity as places where densities go infinitely high and gravity becomes infinitely strong. We know that this really means that our understanding of the physics is going off the wall, and that we have no clue as to what's happening deep inside a