We’re used to thinking of space as continuous.

A stone can be anywhere in space. It can be here. Or it can be an inch to the left. Or it can be half an inch further to the left. Or it can be an infinitesimal fraction of an inch even further to the left. Space is infinitely divisible.

The graphs of Wolfram Physics, however, are discrete.

If, as Stephen Wolfram proposes, the universe is a graph, then you can’t be just anywhere in space. It makes sense to think about a node of the graph as a position in space. It makes no sense to think about anywhere in between the nodes as positions in space. This space is not infinitely divisible.

It’s as if a stone could be here in space, or here in space, but nowhere in between.

So which is it?

Has every physicist from Leucippus to Einstein been right to insist that space is continuous?

Or is Wolfram right to up-end millennia of settled science and insist that space is discrete?

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of Open Web Mind