Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 21:08:48 UTC No. 16635448

>>16635427
~10^186

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 21:11:48 UTC No. 16635450

>>16635427
A bit over 7. After that you get dangerously close to running out of fingers and might need to start using toes.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 21:14:40 UTC No. 16635453

>>16635448
I'm not finding anything on that number. If he doesn't believe in infinity then he must have some mechanism in mind by which numbers eventually terminate.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 21:47:01 UTC No. 16635467

>>16635453
he is not a mathematical essentialist, so he believes math is just a tool and the biggest number is the one we can do something with.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 22:19:54 UTC No. 16635483

>>16635453
number of planck volumes in the observable universe
https://youtu.be/5CiiGdaYEPU?t=655

i suppose it would be practibly less though as one wouldn't be able to turn the universe into a computer for a very large information complexity number

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 22:20:59 UTC No. 16635484

>>16635483
Number of possible states of the universe

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 22:39:43 UTC No. 16635497

>>16635453
No infinity doesn't imply a finite largest number

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 22:59:49 UTC No. 16635506

f(x) = 1/x
find the limit as x approaches 0

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:04:32 UTC No. 16635510

>>16635483
You realize Planck volumes aren't the "smallest size" something can be, right? The Planck volume is just the smallest a volume that we can reliably describe with the current "cosmological constants" we use within theoretical physics. It's not some pixel limit or anything.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:16:35 UTC No. 16635515

>>16635510
but what could be smaller

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:19:39 UTC No. 16635517

>>16635515
Well, aside from your dick, you'd realistically be talking about volumes in a moving sense. The "volume differential" for a moving sub-atomic particle in an arbitrarily small time-step could be smaller.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:24:26 UTC No. 16635520

>>16635515
Btw, we already have seen unit systems in theoretical physics that are smaller than Planck units. Stoney units were used quite a bit in the original theoretical developments for string theory, and they are technically smaller than Planck units.

No matter what, I don't think there's any indication that a "smallest length" or "smallest volume" makes any sense unless you think material reality has a framerate or something. As far as I can tell, there isn't a reason to believe that material physics is driven by some computation engine. Continuous dynamics tend to work better at pretty much every level.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:29:32 UTC No. 16635524

>>16635520
>>16635517
>>16635510
It's my understanding quantum loop gravity is based on or involves discretisation of spacetime at the planck scale, so I think Rovelli would disagree with you. Quantum mechanics does predict that there is a smallest meaningful volume in phase space and it's not just "what we can describe right now"

>The "volume differential" for a moving sub-atomic particle in an arbitrarily small time-step could be smaller.
Could you expand on what you mean? At face value you mean the change in volume occupied by a moving particle but if we just enforce a smallest meaningful time step then this goes away

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:39:43 UTC No. 16635530

>>16635510
>You realize Planck volumes aren't the "smallest size" something can be, right?
I think your accurate, it was off the cuff, like wildburgers 'quarks' statement in the video related . supposedly the computer sci people thought about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:46:56 UTC No. 16635539

>>16635517
>arbitrarily small time-step
Question? Begged.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Apr 2025 23:53:34 UTC No. 16635545

>>16635524
>so I think Rovelli would disagree with you.

Oh no! The founder of useless flavor of the month failed attempt at modeling gravity number 46 would disagree with me! Whatever will I do?

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 00:18:54 UTC No. 16635565

>>16635539
You don't understand how Planck time works. Nobody with any actual sense thinks Planck time is the "smallest units of time" (whatever that means). What people have claimed (and this appears to be true) is that our current fundamental physics becomes inadequate to describe time on intervals smaller than Planck time. This is a reflection of our current fundamental physics being lacking, not some reason to believe that time is "fundamentally discontinuous" with some maximum framerate.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 00:31:23 UTC No. 16635579

>>16635565
Alas, you missed the opportunity to say
>arbitrarily small space-step
and close your circular argument.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 00:40:30 UTC No. 16635585

>>16635579
I don't want to hear anything about circularity from people who believe that the speed of light is constant everywhere based on t=d/v measurements while defining the meter based on "the amount of distance light travels in X seconds."

All of physics is a circular argument.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 00:46:16 UTC No. 16635590

>>16635585
>All of physics is a circular argument.
You sound fine with that.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 01:22:40 UTC No. 16635603

>>16635590
I'm a signal processing engineer, not a physicist. Physics to me, physics is a modeling approach, not "the truth." It seems quite stupid to assume that "Planck time" defines some "minimum amount of time" when this is neither a standard interpretation within physics, nor something which gains you any instrumental utility.

Some people speculate that at "small enough times" (specifying what exactly that means is always conveniently left to the reader as an exercise) we see time itself become non-smooth because we see erratic measurement behavior at very small time-scales. It seems far more likely that time is properly "continuous" and it is the limitations of our modeling approach/measurement platforms that introduce problems. In general, when we see problems with very fine measurements done by computers with limited precision, limited accuracy and clock cycles, it's the technology and modelling that's erratic and not the thing it's trying to measure.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 01:32:47 UTC No. 16635611

>>16635603
Or spacetime is discrete.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 02:32:14 UTC No. 16635648

>>16635497
sure it does my double negative posting friend.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 03:02:29 UTC No. 16635661

>>16635611
Why would it be discrete?

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 03:49:33 UTC No. 16635690

>>16635661
Why not? Uncertainty literally states that exact knowledge breaks at Plank scale and introduces a fuzziness to our knowledge not just of our particles of interest, but also into the nature of spacetime itself. At this scale spacetime could be granular or foamy in nature.
Why on earth would you assume a smoothness below which our theories of spacetime fail when those theories themselves assume the exact smoothness which doesn't work? That's absurd.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 05:25:36 UTC No. 16635740

>>16635427

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 06:00:39 UTC No. 16635759

To all the anons in this thread talking about Planck units: the Planck scale is just the coupling constant of gravity. It is somewhat analogous to electric charge, except it is not dimensionless. That’s what causes problems when trying to naively renormalize gravity.

Now is it “the fundamental scale”? We don’t have a working theory of quantum gravity, so we don’t have an answer. LQG asserts that quantized length operators have the ground state that is some multiple of Planck length times a fixed constant called the Immirzi parameter plus some other stuff. String theory basically states that Planck length is the characteristic string length. Note that the Immirzi parameter does not appear in string theory and the two approaches are very different (canonical in LQG and covariant in string theory).

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 06:26:26 UTC No. 16635767

>>16635427
Are the numbers in the room with us right now?

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 08:14:26 UTC No. 16635798

>>16635545
It's basically lqg and string theory at the moment, it's hardly flavour of the month.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 08:16:08 UTC No. 16635799

>>16635661
Because all our really good models are based on it being discrete and we have (yet) no way of contradicting it. It's a best guess to say that it is and an unfounded assumption to say it isn't.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Apr 2025 17:39:34 UTC No. 16636238

Everyone should stfu about the Planck stuff