markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) (04/19/91)
In article <381@sein.enst-bretagne.fr> beugnard@sein.enst-bretagne.fr (Antoine Beugnard) writes: > Therefore the world is discontinuous !! No ?? In article <SINKKONE.91Apr18173731@kruuna.Helsinki.FI> sinkkone@kruuna.Helsinki.FI (Janne Sinkkonen) writes: >Yes, I believe so! Towards the end of his life, Einstein began to believe that the continuum was not an adequate model of the physical universe, and I think he began searching for alternatives. I believe that today that the consensus in the theoretical community is pretty much that the continuum model of space-time breaks down at a certain length scale: 10 to the -33 meters -- the Planck length (equivalently, 10 to the -40 seconds or so), or more likely at a scale even an order of magnitude larger. The underlying substratum which the continuum approximates has yet to be discovered, but it is very unlikely that it will be anything as straightforward as a dot matrix. Penrose and Hawking have their theories, but I don't really know what they mean with respect to this question yet.