Exactly. This makes the assumption that the universe is continuous instead of discrete. Quantum physics is all about discreteness. Newton himself suspected light was discrete, what he named "corpuscles".
Even if continuous, I would still argue against this article. In a continuous universe non-determinism, randomness, is not needed. In the provided example I would expect no action to take place, or acknowledge that a continuous universe infers an infinite resolution of information for physical systems.
> This makes the assumption that the universe is continuous instead of discrete. Quantum physics is all about discreteness.
This is irrelevant. The discussion is within the framework of classical Newtonian dynamics. The discrete-ness of the universe has no effect whatsoever, because the moment we say we’re using classical mechanics, we assume a flat Euclidean continuous spacetime. The argument is made in these terms, and in can be proven or disproven in this framework.
> Newton himself suspected light was discrete, what he named "corpuscles".
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether spacetime itself is quantised or not. You can have a concept of point particles in a continuous space, that’s not a problem.
> In a continuous universe non-determinism, randomness, is not needed. In the provided example I would expect no action to take place
That is a good intuition.
> or acknowledge that a continuous universe infers an infinite resolution of information for physical systems.
However, this is not. Even in a continuous universe (and, until proven otherwise, our understanding is that ours is), infinite “information” is not really a thing.
To my knowledge, there are very few concrete proposals for what a discrete universe would actually look like. Most physicists believe that the universe should be symmetric under lorentz transforms, which rules out all the obvious ways like splitting the universe into little cubes.
Although discrete models may not exist, discreetness is expected because without there's likely unsolvable informational problems.
This is why Beckenstein was so brilliant, he was among the first to understand physical systems must fit into information theory. If they don't, physics has far worse and profound issues.
Any description of the universe is informational. We should hope that the universe is informational so that humanity can have a complete description of the cosmos. If the universe is not informational, since description by nature is informational, there would be no way to describe the universe completely.
You missed my point. It’s not a thing in a continuous universe. And again, there is no proof whatsoever that ours is not, and we don’t need to invoke any spacetime quantisation to explain any of the current established theories. I am not saying that the universe is not discrete (I just don’t know), but if it’s discrete character we’re this trivial to observe, it would have been settled for a long time.
Even if continuous, I would still argue against this article. In a continuous universe non-determinism, randomness, is not needed. In the provided example I would expect no action to take place, or acknowledge that a continuous universe infers an infinite resolution of information for physical systems.