How can there be smallest "packet" of space?

Question

How can there be smallest distance for space?

Do you think this is just a mathmatical "trick" in order for physicists to fit all the pieces together in their theory of "everything"?

String theory seems to have a lot of mathmatical necessities that seems to be just contrived in order to fit all the pieces together.

It's more a philosophy than science!

Answer 1

The "contrivances" you speak of aren't just random tricks. Basically, physicists work from details they KNOW, and try to generate equations that extrapolate this KNOWLEDGE to broader areas of interpretation. So, they KNOW that subatomic particles behave in certain quantized ways and can develop quantum theory based on that. But when they try to apply this to the broader area of galactic and universal distance scales, the equations do not have any real solutions. But since the universe DOES exists, the equations MUST have real solutions. Therefore, the problem becomes one of finding a way to make the equations have real solutions. One way is to expand the basis set from 4 dimensions to 11 dimensions. This is not a "trick", it is a well understood mathematical transformation. (Well, well-understood by people with really high degrees of mathematical education!) Once this completely legal and well-understood transformation is undertaken, the equations have real solutions. SO, the question becomes, is it just convenient that the equations are solvable in 11 dimensions? Or is that the true nature of the universe?? That question is still open for resolution.

Answer 2

It's basically an on-going conflict between classic science and quantum mechanics. The strange actions that have been observed to happen at very small scales that are described by quantum theory are very much unlike classic science that has been in observation for thousands of years.

Sometimes it takes a little bit of philosophy to open a new window to understand what is going on in the universe. Einstein demonstrated this principle when he philosophized/imagined what it would be like to ride on a beam of light.

Believe me, scientists have no interest in wasting anyone's time with fabrications. It's just that the Universe came with no owner's manual. So we have to figure it out for ourselves; and we humans are pretty pathetic in comparison to all that there is.

Answer 3

How cannot be smallest distance in space?
If there's no smallest distance, then space must contain infinite number of points. Have you seen anything infinite? Inifnity (and more so continuity) is mathematical abstraction, which does not correspond to anything real, and worse, causes contradictions at the very basic level (like set of all all sets). More often than not, what we thought was continuous, turns out to be if not finite, then at least discrete. For example continuous electric charge turned out to consist of discrete elemetntary charges, angular momentum is quintized in units of h, the number of visible stars turned out to be finite. Descrete quantity immediately explains corresponding conservation law (charge conservation), but linear momentum remains continuous. Simply put the space MUST be discrete.

Answer 4

Questions like this cannot be answered with the current state of the art science and math. But, questions like this might lead to a better state of the art. Similar questions were being asked way back in the 10th century.