[sdiy] Is everything digital?

[Richard Wentk]

At 21:59 14/05/2005, Bob Weigel wrote:
>Hehe.  I make a formal faith based statement below.  It *is* far more 
>complex than you or I or anyone realizes. :-)  The more we look to 
>understand the depths of things the more questions arise.  We still don't 
>have any kind of real concept of what energy is though we describe it's 
>interactions mathmatically.   We dont' have a clue about how radiation 
>travels.  I mean...we are talking about waves propogating through NOTHING. 
>We are...aware of absolutely nothing there hence the reference 
>"space".  :-)  Yet..waves don't travel through nothing.  EM energy has no 
>mass.  All we know is..there is something about 'space' (ahem..that makes 
>no sense..but that is the way we talk because we STILL don't know WHAT we 
>are talking about ! :-)  Space is..by definition..nothing. Space.  Think 
>about the grammar.  Void.

No, space is only empty of physical stuff you can bump into. It's not empty 
of vacuum energy, and it's not empty of the mechanisms that allow for 
energy propagation. (Whatever those are.)

Just because we can't see the detail doesn't mean it's there or not 
important. The vacuum only *looks* empty from the level we're used to 
looking at it, because the background processes it's running don't leave 
direct physical footprints in the way that foreground energy/matter do.

A true void would absent of all geometry, and (probably) of time too.

Richard