At one point in history, there were a group of philosophers who determined that motion was impossible. You see, in order to cover any distance, you first much cover half that distance. This is another distance so you have to cover first of this distance before you can cover all of it. Can you see where this is going? To cover all of any distance, you must first cover an infinite number of halfway points.

The result is that any distance is infinitely long. If every distance is infinitely long, then motion cannot be possible. To move any distance, you would have to move an infinite distance. No infinite distance could be traversed at a finite velocity because it would take forever.

None of that makes any real sense. Somebody coming to this site asked for some actual secrets of the universe and we representatives of ‘Secrets of the Universe’ do like to give our visitors what they ask for. That leads me to deliver a real secret of the universe here, even if I have to make it up. It is the kind of thing that I am really good at, anyway.

What if the universe is not analog? If the universe is granular, similar to a digital framework, then the above model of motion would be inaccurate. It would not be possible to divide every distance down into an infinite number of smaller distances because there would be a minimum distance in the universe. This is like looking at your computer monitor with a magnifying glass. Nothing smaller than a pixel can be displayed on the screen. Anything below this minimum size of the monitor universe could not exist within the monitor universe. Other universes, with smaller pixels, could contain such objects; however, they could never enter the monitor universe.

Could this also be true of the universe that we occupy? As long as these pixels of time-space, point-moments as I call them, were adequately small, we would never notice them. It would just set a minimum size, in both time and space, for objects within creation. There would be nothing for us to compare it to because these point-moments would be the size of zero in our universe even if they were miles and decades long in another universe. Odd how that works.

Another result would be a universal speed limit. Granularity provides resistence to movement. No object in our universe could travel outside of the point-moments. The maximum speed of anything in the universe would be one point per moment. Otherwise, the object would be jumping across time-space instead of moving through it.

Stand up philosophers cannot be expected to write equations to describe how fast this is. That is somebody else’s problem. I am only writing this to give away one of the secrets of the universe in order to keep the readership happy. Joel is the brains of this operation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.