Is the Universe pixelated?

Is there a shortest possible distance? Or can you cut space in half forever?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Daniel, have you heard of the Zenos paradox? Yeah?
Is that the one where you can't get to where
because you keep going half the distance and then half
that distance and half that distance. Yeah. It's kind of
like this thought experiment where you say, all right, I'm
trying to get home, so I'm gonna get to half
of the distance to my home, and then you stop
and you say, all right, now I'm gonna get half

(00:27):
of the distance to my home. And so you go
another half of that and you say, now I'm going
to go half of the distance to my home, and
you do that half, and so the question is will
you ever get home? I mean, it sounds like you
would always get there because you're always going half of
what's left, but you might never get there, right, And
it raises an interesting question, right, because if you can
cut a mile and a half and then cut that

(00:47):
in a half to a quarter mile, and cut that
in half to an eighth of a mile, can you
keep cutting it to infinitely small distances? Like are those
distances even meaningful on a physics point of view? Or
is there a shortest possible distance in the universe? Afterwards,
Zeno has to actually take that step right, So physics
could be like Zeno's paradox, more like Zeno's paradk Not,

(01:09):
that's right, Zino's paradox unraveled. I am and I'm Daniel,

(01:30):
and welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe,
where we take the universe, cut it in half, and
then cut it in half again, and cut it in
half again and again until it's small enough for everybody
to understand and happily digest. This is Daniel Jorges podcast paradox.
And unlike that paradox, this will actually end at some
point in about thirty thirty five minutes, that's right. Not

(01:53):
if you listen to half the podcast and then half
was left, and then half of what's left right, infinitely
slicing the podcast, you can enjoy it forever. Yeah, at
some point you'll be like, but that's right, we'll be
listening to one unit of laughter. But that's sort of
the question we want to talk about today. Can you

(02:13):
slice up space into smaller and smaller pieces? Can you
divide it into short and short distances? Or is space
pixelated like a video game? That's right? Or your latest iPhone.
You look around you and it seems like the universe
is continuous and smooth, right, But it might be that

(02:35):
the universe is actually pixelated. That you can be here,
or then Jason pixelby, you can't be in between, that
there's the shortest possible distance to the universe. So not
the stuff is pixelated, but the actual like the universe itself,
the space in it is like a video game. It's pixelated.
It's not continuous and infinite resolution exactly. And it's a

(02:56):
perfect analogy to the stuff. Right. In particle physics, we
love to take things apart. We say your body is
made of molecules, and those molecules are made of atoms,
and those atoms are made of smaller particles, and those
little particles get down to corks and leptons. We're looking
for the tiniest particle, the base particle out of which
everything is built. But in a completely parallel track, we
can ask the same questions about space. Is a mile

(03:19):
built out of half miles, which just built out of
quarter miles, which eventually is built out of the smallest unit,
or can you infinitely divide it? So this is a
mind blowing question, And so we were curious what you
thought the answer was, do you think the universe is pixelated? Yeah?
So I went around. I asked a random selection of
UC Irvine undergraduates who were not put off by a

(03:41):
weird physics professor holding a mic in their face, and
ask them this question, do you think the universe is pixelated?
Here's what they had to say. This quantized basically as
the atoms cannot be. I mean, of course they're made
by subatomic particles. But I think after that, like it
can be continuous. I think this spread to do it.
I think it's like I can ask him to like,

(04:04):
you reach smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller,
but you never get to like a finite like this
is the smallest thing. Um. I think it would probably
get smaller and smaller forever. I really don't know about this.
This is a tough lue. It's a topic. What's your
best guess? What do you think the job cuts say? Really?

(04:24):
You know this one is really beyond my understanding of
this whole ward right now? Yeah, all right to People
were kind of skeptical about this. There's a whole spectrum
of answers. I mean some people are like, no, you
can chop things down infinitely far. Other people like no,
quantum mechanics says everything is quantized and therefore there must
be pixels. And other people are like, wow, I have

(04:44):
no idea, what are you talking about? And I totally
regret agreeing to answer your questions. It's like, I've never
heard these two words at the same time, universe and pixels.
That's right, that's right, and it is a weird question,
you know. But the pixels is a perfect analogy because,
like if you have a modern iPhone and you look
at the screen, it seems like the pictures are fluid,

(05:07):
they're smooth, or you can't see the pixels because they
have this retin a display. It gives the illusion that
it's completely smooth. But it's kind of interesting because if
you look at an old phone, like just from five
to ten years ago, it looks horribly pixelated, that's right.
It looks crunchy and chunky, and you're you you think,
how could I ever have seen this and thought that

(05:28):
this was anything of quality? That's right. And you know,
even um old fashioned photographs, the ones that are analoged,
not digital, ones that use chemistry, those in effect have
pixels as well. They're just so small that you can't
see them, because you know, the development process is a
chemical process and so it's based on you know, molecules
and drops of fluid and whatever. It's just the pixels

(05:48):
are so small. So if the pixels are small enough
that you can't see them, it gives you the illusion
that it's perfectly continuous and that you could, you know,
zoom in forever and see more and more details, you know,
like on that on those cop shows, whether they like
enhance the image and it can just like zoom in
forever and read the time on somebody's watch or something
right right, or get like a face match. Yeah, but

(06:11):
in a real picture, there's a limit to the information
that's been captured. And if you look from far away,
it looks like you could zoom in forever. But at
some point, as you start zooming in, you notice the pixels.
And so that's the question we were wondering about today, like, sure,
space seems continuous around us, but is it possible that
if we zoomed in far enough, the pixels could appear
at some point? Yeah, So that's kind of related to

(06:33):
the question of space itself, Like we know stuff is
made that a little bit, But is space itself also
pixelated like an iPhone screen or an old photograph. Yeah,
and this question is newly fascinating because we're only recently
learning what space is, right, Like the question of is
space pixelated is a reasonable question in parallel to is

(06:54):
matter quantized and made out of the smallest particles, because
we've recently realized that space really is thing. Also, it's
not just like emptiness. Those of you are out there
saying this is silly. Space is nothing and so of
course you could be anywhere in it and you can
divide it infinitely. We've recently realized this space is not nothing.
Before we thought it was nothing, just the absence of anything.

(07:15):
But actually it's not right. It's almost like a medium,
or like what the ocean is to fish. Yeah, exactly,
it's a thing. It has dynamical properties. Right. We know
that it's not nothing because you can do things that
nothing can't do. Right. For example, space can expand that's
what dark energy is. And for those of you whose
minds were just blown about the meaning of the phrase

(07:36):
space can expand, go off and listen to our dark
energy episode where we talk all about that and space
can wiggle, right, like things in space can expand and
contract with these wiggles as gravitational waves passed through them.
And you know, those of you interested in that, go
off and listen to our gravitational waves episode. And we
also know that space can bend, right, that's what general

(07:56):
relativity tells us, and tells us that gravity is not
a force, but in that it's a bending of space.
So space definitely is a thing. It has properties, and
we've only just recently discovered that it's a thing and
begun to investigate it. And so it's a very reasonable
question to ask, is space pixelated like we think matter
might be, Like what is it made out of it?
Or what's it like? Really? You know, it's not nothing,

(08:19):
So if it's something, it's like space is some famous celebrity,
you know, right, what space like? You know on the
weekend out? Is it egotistical? It seems egotistical, you know,
it seems so into itself. What spaces favorite color? Black? Black?
Space color? That one? I think we know that's a

(08:40):
settled question in science. No, I think it's important to
think about this question, like what is the smallest unit
of space? Right? What is space built out of? Um?
And I think the analogy to you know, understanding what
matter is built out of? Works? They're like, is space
built out of the little bits? Right? These pixels? And
then the next question if you discover space is built
that it pixels is what are those pixels made out of?

(09:02):
It could be that those pixels are made out of
something smaller and deeper that's nothing like space, So that
space itself is an emergent phenomenon, not a fundamental thing
in our universe. That's something that arises, you know, like
wetness or economics, you know, so not something that's built
in at the very beginning of the universe, but something
that comes out of how things interact. Well, let's take

(09:26):
this approach. So let's assume that space is pixel ated. Okay,
what is the space pixel mean or feel like or
look like? Or what would it do to things? Yeah? Well,
what would it would mean is that you can't be
just anywhere you want in space, you know, just like
Zeno the beginning of this episode. It would mean that
at some point, if you're small enough or you can
zoom down enough, it would mean that you have to

(09:47):
make a choice. Are you at location end or location
N plus one? Right? It would mean the space is
discrete the way integers are, instead of being continuous the
way real numbers are. Right, there's an infant the number
of numbers. For example, between one and two, there's one,
one point five, one point two, seven, eight four, and
you can always squeeze more numbers in there. It's an

(10:08):
infinite amount of numbers between one and two if you're
talking about real numbers, a continuous line of numbers. But
for integers, like there's just one and there's two, there's
no more integers in between. Space could be like that
where you're like, I'm at this spot, and if I
want to take a step, there's the shortest distance I
can step, and so you have to go to two.
It's kind of like if you were on your iPhone

(10:28):
you were animating one pixel dot black dot on a
white background. This dot can't just be anywhere on the screen.
It has to move from one box to the next box.
That's right. It can't like cross over the boundary. You
can't be halfway between one pixel and another because then
each pixel would have to be half white and half black,
which they can't be. Right at pixel is the basic
unity either on or it's off, So like, if you

(10:50):
look at the iPhone from a distance, this dot would
look like it's moving smoothly across the screen, but really
it's taking a little jumps between squares, right, Like it's
in square ones at this moment, and then it's suddenly
in the next ware, and then suddenly it's in the
next player. You're saying that maybe, like I'm not really
moving continuously through space. Maybe I'm just kind of like

(11:10):
jumping from one box to the next exactly. And the
illusion of smoothness, the way you feel of it that
you are moving smoothly, is your brain stitching that together.
And it's easy to do because the pixels, if they exist,
would be super duper tiny. But they only have to
be smaller than we can notice. You know. For example,
if you slow down a movie, it's nothing but a

(11:31):
bunch of still images, right, and if you watch them
fast enough the key is faster than your eye can
register the differences, then it appears to be an infinitely
smooth sequence. It seems like you're watching something in real life.
Slow down of course, and you can see, oh, it's
just a bunch of still images. In the same way
space might be discreete We just haven't noticed, but that

(11:51):
if you get small enough, you realize that these nodes.
You know, it's like you can't get off halfway between
subway stations, right, might be the space is like that
that every location in spaces like a subway stop. You
don't want to get off the train halfway between pasions
and get stuck in the tunnel. Right. You can't write
the universe forbids it Right, But if you're the pixel
like in the in the screen, the pixel isn't really moving.

(12:14):
You just turn it off in one square and you
turn it on them the next square, so it sort
of disappears and it appears. Yes, are you gonna ask
if that's really like teleportation? Yeah? Right, Like does that
mean as I'm moving through space, I'm actually like disappearing
here and appearing in the next spot. Yeah, I guess
it does, you know? I guess it means that you
zapp from one spot to the other without going in

(12:34):
between them, right, And so that really is a kind
of teleportation. I hadn't thought of that before. It's sort
of awesome. Um. In the same way, like if time
is quantized, then you know you're sort of slicing your
way through time. In the same way. That's fascinating. Yeah,
so we're if space is pixelated, that we're all teleporting
right now, all the time, only you move, only if

(12:55):
you moved. Oh my god, we just invented teleportation right
here live on the podcast. Amazing. Get the legal team
on the patent please, will you? And there goes your
physics professorship right out the door right there. That's right. Boom,
I'm officially a crackpot. Well, let's take a quick break
before we go on. Okay, so that's what it means

(13:27):
for the universe to be pixelated, that we're all just
kind of trapped in an iPhone screen. Then we can't
really move anywhere. We have to move within these boxes.
That's right. But if it is, it's a really fancy,
super modern iPhone because the pixels would be super duper tiny, right,
it has an awesome graphics processor. What would you call
it the iPhone you It would be like a quantum display.

(13:52):
That's right, iPhone verse, Tim Cook, give us a call.
That's right. Somebody put a trademark on man. We need
like a constant legal team standing by just to you know,
get down all the great ideas we come up with.
On the fly. So how could we tell if we
are in a pixelated universe or not? Yeah, well that's
hard because to see that we are in a pixelated universe,

(14:16):
and we'd have to see the pixels, right, So we
have to zoom in somehow far enough to be able
to see them, and of course so far we haven't.
So far everything seems continuous. We don't notice discontinuities in
the way things move um, and we also have no
idea how big these pixels are. Right, so far, we
have explored space and matter using high energy particle colliders,

(14:38):
and that's let us probe down to about ten to
the minus twenty meters. That's zero point than twenty zeros
in a one. I mean, that's a tiny little distance.
I don't even know what the prefixes for that. It's
some super tiny distance. We've studied space down about that
distance using particle colliders where we smash these tiny particles

(14:58):
together and use the probe tons so like look inside
the other protons, and that lets us study space. So
we know that if there are space pixels, they have
to be smaller than that, right, you meaning at the
large Hadron collider, you can poke things at that distance,
meaning you can tell if things matched together within that
small of a distance apart. Right, Yeah, Essentially, our current

(15:19):
theory assumes a space is continuous, and our current theory
doesn't break down down to ten of the minus twenty,
and so we would notice some deviation. Something would be different,
The calculations would be wrong if space became pixelated and
at a level let that we didn't expect. And so
so far we're pretty sure spaces seems continuous down to
ten to the minus twenty. So the pixels, if they exist,

(15:42):
have to be really small, right. But I wonder, you know,
if there's a philosophical limit there, you know, in the
sense that like, do you think Super Mario, if he's
in the video game and he's a pixelated character, could
he tell that the world was pixelated? You know, because
he's pixelated and he thinks in pixelated thought? Could he
not things pixelated thoughts? Yeah, you know what I mean.

(16:06):
I think, in terms of thought units, here's a three
pixel unit thought. I think that's an interesting question. If
the pixels they we lived in a universe where the
pixels were fairly large in comparison to our bodies. Yeah,
I mean, I think that's hard to imagine that realistically
because it would mean there's a pretty strong limit on

(16:27):
how complex our bodies could be. I mean, if your
body was made out of pixels that were like six
centimeters across, then you could just couldn't be very complicated
if you were a meat or tall. In order to
have enough complication to have an interesting mind, you know,
you need a huge, complicated brain. So the brain would
have to be enormous compared to the size of the pixels.
So I think it's pretty hard to have complex enough

(16:48):
life to ask that question um and still be small
compared to the size of the pixels. So if super
Mario is an idiot, then yeah, he'd probably be pretty
close to the size of the pixels. But then he's
not gonna be asking the question why am I pixels? Well,
his intelligence would be pixelated, so he probably have zero units.
And then if he takes a mushroom, is that going
to grow too? That's just you know, I always wondered

(17:10):
about those mushrooms, you know, does that change the way
he thinks? Like what is going on with those mustions?
But where do I get something? He doesn't actually get
bigger at just his pixels in his mind. That's right.
Then the other question is, you know, would he even
think to ask the question if pixels were obviously the universe,
you wouldn't ask why is the universe pixelated? You would

(17:31):
just be one of the basic assumptions that you accept
day to day, you know. And that's one of the
things I find fascinating about physics is that we keep
unraveling basic assumptions about the universe that we didn't even
really think to question, you know, the questions like is
time the same for everybody? Right? Of course we used
to think, of course, it was like time is time
in a clock here and a clock there are the same,

(17:51):
And now we know it's not. Time is relative and
depends on your speed and all sorts of weird stuff.
So physics is helping us peel back the universe and
figure out where are perceptions have led to biases in
the way we view the universe, and so why that's
why this space pixelization is just like another one on
the list. It might be eventually, physics shows us that
space is different than the way we always imagine, you know,

(18:12):
that's made up of these little units. So I think
what you're saying is that as far as we know,
we look at the world around us and the complexity
of it, it's such that we're pretty sure that it's
not pixelated up to a certain scale, which is tend
to the minus twenty. Yeah, we certainly do. And if
we were close to the pixel scale, it would limit
how much complexity we could have in our universe. Right

(18:33):
If if the pixels were a centimeter across, then our
one meter scale life couldn't be very complex at all. Right, Right,
Like what kind of interesting thing could you build out
of actual real sized legos? Right, you can't make a
machine that's very complicated. You know, you want to see
these rich effects that you see when you put the
world around you. Yeah, yeah, Okay. So what makes scientists

(18:55):
even think that the universe could be pixelated? I think
they were just hanging out in the sevenies and smoking
too much weed and they were like, man, though, it's
it's not like um. Some people might think, Oh, it
comes from the idea that the universe is a simulation,
and if it's a simulation, then of course it's pixelated,
because computers in the outside the universe are pixelated. Now,

(19:17):
it comes from a deeper place becomes from noticing that
quantum mechanics seems to work really well. Right, Quantum mechanics
has described everything we know except for gravity, and it
seems to be a fundamental description of the universe that
everything is quantized. You know, packets of light, for example,
can't have an arbitrary amount of energy, they can only
have certain units of energy. Matter itself is made out

(19:40):
of particles, which are little quantized bits of stuff. Right,
So it seems like, for for a reason we don't understand,
the universe is quantized, and quantized of course, just means
little units of stuff, and so it's very natural to
imagine that space also might be quantized. The space also,
instead of being infinitely divisible, might also be it out

(20:00):
of pieces. Because the universe seems to like quantum mechanics.
So you're saying that, like the stuff that we see
around us does have smallest bits, like there is a
lego piece of matter. You can't split an electron really
like you can have half an electron or a quarter
of electron. So maybe that says something about the universe
as a whole, like maybe everything is just kind of blocking.

(20:21):
That's right, it would make sense, it would it would
feel natural and it would feel coherent with what we
think about modern physics if space was also quantized. And
then there's you know, there's some technical reasons, like there
are some theories physics which just don't work if you
get small enough. What do you mean, you know, some
theories of quantum mechanics and the way it describes interactions

(20:44):
below a certain distance that you just start to get infinities.
Like you you know, how does the theory of physics work? Well,
it's a it's something that predicts an experiment, right, say,
I think this is going to happen. What is my
theory of electromagnetism tell me? And so you can do
some calculation. It tells you the actron is gonna turn
left and go at this angle. But sometimes the theories
break and they give you numbers that make no sense,

(21:05):
like oh, the electron is gonna turn and it's gonna
go to infinite angle or have infinite energy. So there's
some theories and it's a bit too technical to get
into that break down at really really small scales um
and they just start to give infinities. And so some
of those problems are solved if you have the smallest distance,
because then you don't have to go to those smallest scales, right,

(21:27):
And this especially is a problem when people try to
describe gravity using quantum mechanics. It comes up with all
sorts of crazy problems. And one solution to that is
to say, well, what if there is the shortest distance,
then we don't have to think about doing these calculations
down to infinitely small distances. Right, So nothing can happen
at such a small scale. So in theory, the theory
doesn't break down. It's just nothing can happen at that scale.

(21:48):
So why you can worry about it. Yeah, it's like
a clue. It's saying, oh, this theory doesn't work. It
can't describe universe where there's infinitely small distances something. Then
the idea is, well, maybe the theory is wrong, or
maybe the universe doesn't have infinitely small distances, in which
case the theory works. There's lots of fun ways to
make your theory work, and one of them is just
to imagine that the places where it breaks are the

(22:10):
places where it's not physical, where it's not actually describing
what's happening. Well, this is a perfect point to take
a break. Well, this is interesting. So there's apparently a

(22:32):
number that physicists think might be the pixel of the universe. Like,
there's like a concrete number they think might tell you
what the pixelation the resolution of the universe is, right
a little bit, I mean I think that's overstating it.
There is a number which we think might have something
to do with the pixelization of the universe. But the
argument is pretty weak. All right, I'll walk you through it,

(22:53):
but you'll be unimpressed with how strong argument is. Alright,
just trying to manage your expectations a little bit, right,
all right, I'll make them pixel size. There you go, Yeah,
I go from one unit of expectation. Here's the argument.
The argument is, we've noticed there are some fundamental constants
in the universe, like the speed of light, and that
has units meters per second, right, And that's just a number,

(23:14):
and we measure it, and it's a parameter of the universe.
We don't know why it's this and why it's that,
and of course we have a whole podcast episode about that,
but it is a number. And there are other units
we've noticed, like the strength of gravity, right, it's called
big G. The gravitational constant appears in Newton's formula, and uh,
you know, and the plank constant, the one that appears
in quantum mechanics. It tells you how um, well, you

(23:36):
can know two numbers at the same time. So there's
all these basic units that we've measured and we've discovered,
and we think they reveal something about the universe. We
think they tell us something about why the universe is
this way not that way, and we don't know where
they come from. They're kind of like the pie or
you know, just the number that exists in the universe. Yeah, well,
pies an especially fascinating one because it's unit lists, right,

(23:57):
so it's pure in some sense. But these numbers have units,
you know, they're like jewels per second or meters per
second or whatever. And so we think they tell us
something about why the universe is this size or has
this or you can go this fast, or you know,
it's some sort of like ratio between two things. Yes, exactly.
They fix the relationship between things like the speed of
light fixes the relationship between distance and time. Right, it's

(24:20):
meters per second, So I see that the speed of
light is like a universal physics number. Yes exactly, And
so there's other numbers like these in physics theories. Yeah,
there's a few that we've discovered along the way, and
we think they're deep and fundamental, and you know, some
future theory of physics might reveal why they are the
way they are, but currently they're just numbers, and we
imagine that they could have been set to something else,

(24:40):
and that's a whole other discussion. Here's the thing you
can do, though, is that you can manipulate these numbers.
You can multiply them by each other until you get
a number that has units of distance. So you multiply
um planks constant and you have the gravitational constant the
speed of light squared. You can cancel out all the
units until you get a number that has just units
of distance. Okay, so what is that number. Well, they

(25:01):
call it the plank length because it has planks constant
in it, and it's a number. And the number is
ten to the minus thirty five meters. That's zero point
thirty five zeros and then a one. So that's a tiny,
tiny number. And because it comes from these simple basic units,
we imagine it has special meaning. We imagine that it's
a clue that it tells us something about the way

(25:24):
the universe works. And because it's just units of distance,
we like to think that it tells us something about
the fundamental nature of distance in the universe, that does it?
I mean, who knows. It's just a bunch of numbers
we multiplied together, you know, and we thought those numbers
were important, but maybe they're not. It's kind of like
if you take the smallest things and the fastest things,

(25:45):
you know, and you know, like the the smallest bit
of matter and the going up the fastest possible speed,
and you know, what would be the smallest distance that
it could go. That's kind of what it is to
mix all of these numbers together. Right, Yeah, it's it's
not that much smarter an argument than that great I
feelt like that was an insult. I don't say that
to insult physics, right, Like, it's not a great argument.

(26:06):
But it's the first thing you do, right, it's unit analysis.
Say well, if we have no clue, what can we do. Well,
let's command these numbers and maybe that will give us
a clue. So it's not no physicist are out there
saying this is definitely the fundamental unit of the distance.
It just says, if there is one, it might be
around this number. I mean, within a factor of a
hundred or a thousand would be a pretty still a

(26:28):
pretty good clue, right, tend to the negative thirty five,
which sounds really small. It is really small. It is
really small, but it's kind of it's not small comparative infinity,
do you know what I mean? Like the number Pi,
you can take decimals out to thirty five thirty five
million decimals. Yeah, but you're saying maybe the universe only

(26:49):
goes up to thirty five decimals. Yeah, that's right. It's
a lot bigger than you know, ten to the minus
one hundred, or ten of the minus one thousand, or
ten of the minus ten thousand, Right, these are much
much smaller numbers. Um. The thing is, it's also much
smaller than the thing we've seen. Remember we studied space
down about ten to the minus twenty, So that means

(27:09):
that we are a factor ten to the fifteen away
from seeing these pixels, if in fact they exist, and
if they're at that scale. Yeah, I mean, just for
a sense of scale, like the solar system is ten
to the fifteen meters across, I believe, so if you
could only see things, you know, down to ten to
the fifteen meters, you'd be missing a lot of interesting detail,

(27:30):
Like you'd miss Earth and life and planets and stuff
and us. What a tragedy, I know. How could you
study the universe without seeing the most important and best
looking two dudes in it? Right? Like if you were
a giant decisive a galaxy and you had an iPhone
the size of you know, the Milky Way, and the
biggest pixel in it was the sizeable solar system, there
would be a lot you'd be missing exactly. So between

(27:53):
where we've seen at tend of the minus twenty meters
and how far things might go attend to the minus
thirty five ms, they would be a huge amount of
complexity and richness down there that we're totally ignorant of.
Little tiny pixel people think asking these same questions, it
could be a little pixelated alien going Mario, hold on,

(28:14):
I don't think I've ever heard your time. That's pretty good,
and we just lost all of our Italian listeners. Um,
the Italian listeners please write in and comment at Jorge's
accent at Daniel and Jorge dot comn Jorgel fans, the
whole Country dot Com. Okay, well, um, let's get some

(28:40):
perspective here. What what do you think would mean for
us and our understanding of ourselves or universe if we
found out that the universe is pixelated? It would be
a really deep inside just into the very nature of
the universe. You know, to know that number tells you
something about the scale at which the universe was built. Right,
Everything in the universe happens from its basic elements. So

(29:02):
we have fascinating structure, you know, galaxies and superclusters and
all that stuff, but all that arises from the interactions
of smaller pieces, you know, particles and electrons. Everything is
determined by what happens at the smallest scale, right, So
everything in the universe comes out of these basic elements.
So to learn how big the smallest unit is tells

(29:23):
you how the universe was constructed. And in the end,
what is science and physics about other than this goal
of trying to deprogram the universe or look at the
source code or figure out how this thing is organized.
And so that would be pretty pretty awesome, but you
know it would actually just be a first step. Yeah, no,
it's it's you just made me realize it would really
kind of blow your mind to just have this sense

(29:45):
that the universe has a structure, right, that it's somehow
feels built, you know, like there's a scaffolding to the universe. Yeah,
like a graph paper, right, And then you have to
ask questions like who made the graph paper and why
that size? Right? Why is it ten of THEUS and
not ten of the minus five or ten of the
mines thirty meters? Right? What does that mean? There's like

(30:08):
a clue there about the very structure of the universe.
Is it a random number and it generated arbitrarily when
all the multiverses were created? Or does it give you
a clue somehow about something deep about the universe. On
the other hand, you know, we talked about like galaxy
is just being emergent phenomenon, right, there a really cool thing,
but they're just formed out of smaller bits and their
complex behavior arises into this thing called a galaxy. A

(30:31):
lot of people think these days that space itself could
be an emergent phenomenon, Okay, that these pixels of space
could be built out of something smaller that are not
that's not space. So space is not space, is what
you're saying space is actually you know, A and B
or a combination of Yeah, yeah, the way like you know,

(30:52):
cookies are not their ingredients, right, you mix them together,
you bake them, you get a cookie. But if you
start with flour and utter and sugar and none of
those things are cookies, right, So cookies an emergent phenomena
in your kitchen. They're not a fundament you know what
I mean, unless you buy a lot of cookies and
that's all you buy, in which case they are the
fundamental pixel of your kitchen. Like, there's even some hidden

(31:13):
forces inside of space, is what you're saying, right, Like
there's something yes, yeah, And there's some pretty cool theories
about that. Like there's one that's called them quantum loop theory,
and it builds space out of these tiny little loops.
It says, maybe the fundamental unit of location in the
universe is not space, it's something else. It's these little

(31:33):
tiny loops, and those would be quantized of course, quantum
loop gravity. And out of those the way those things
are connected, space is formed. And that can tell you
all sorts of things, like well, maybe that tells you
why there's a maximum speed to how fast information can
travel through space because it's how fast these loops can
talk to each other. Like space is not like a space,

(31:55):
is not like a jelly or like a space. It's
more like a mesh or like a weed. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
or a really complicated subway system and connected by these
other forces. And so you hear people eminent um science
communicated saying things like maybe space emerges from the quantum foam, right,
and like I was to hear that, and I think,

(32:16):
what does that even mean? Man um And that's what
it means. It means that it's not a basic element
of the universe, but that it comes out of the
interaction of smaller stuff, right the way cookies come out
of ingredients. Because I'm walking down the street, what's actually
happened is that all of my electrons and protons and
cords are actually like moving around in this mesh, this
invisible mesh that is the universe. No, no, no, I

(32:39):
think it's even it's a trickier to think about than that,
because you can't think of these elements of this mesh
as bits of space. They're not right, You can't move
from one to the other. Somehow space arises from that
This whole concept of location and motion through it could
be an emergent phenomenon, right, and the one that doesn't

(32:59):
have any meaning below that distance. So you're not moving
through the mesh somehow, you know, information is propagating through
the measure, the mess is interacting with itself in some way.
But this notion of moving comes out of your assumption that,
like space is fundamental, and we have to rethink that
if space is not fundamental, meaning like a super Mario
moving around the screen in your TV, it's not actually moving.

(33:21):
He's just like a table of data in some program
that doesn't doesn't look like space. It's just numbers related
to each other exactly. That's the perfect way to think
about it. What makes those pixels right, not smaller pixels? Right?
It's some calculation inside the iPhone and is a little
bit of technology there that lights that up, and you
know it's not motion, So it's something totally different underneath.

(33:42):
And so it could be the universe is made out
of things that this gradation is granularity of space. These
grains are made out of something totally new and alien
to us, and discovering them could peel back a layer
and reveal something really deep about the universe and so
you know, past the joint man, because we're we're getting
pretty deep here. So what do you think or hey,

(34:08):
do you think space is pixelated? Or you think this
is just a crazy idea? You know, intuitively, it seems implausible, right,
Like space seems so smooth, and like we said before,
it would mean that we're always sort of teleporting from
one spot to the other. But you know, like you said,
who knows, right, we used to think matter was perfectly smooth,
but it turned out not to be. So it sounds

(34:29):
like modern physics has uprooted you from all of your
beliefs about the way the world works. Huh. You know
you now have skepticism about everything. Yeah, are you even there, Daniel?
Um No. I think that's a healthy attitude, you know,
um And I think it's hard to hold that in
your head. I mean, on one hand, you go around
your daily life, you drive your car, you buy coffee,

(34:51):
you do all these things without thinking about the way
the world is working underneath you. And then sometimes I'm
just struck breathless by realizing the credible complexity of things
that are happening invisibly around us. Um And you know,
that things might be totally different from the way we imagined.
It's hard to hold that in your head a lot,
which is why it's nice sometimes to just read a
magazine and you a cup of coffee because it's breathtaking.

(35:14):
You know. It's disorienting the way learning that we're tiny
specs on a little mode of dust and a huge
universe is um but it's also fun. Well, I hope
that you guys out there listening also maybe see the
world a little bit differently. All right, thanks very much
for listening, and enjoy the rest of your day. If

(35:42):
you still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Nine