Is nature continuous or discrete? How the atomist error was born

Is nature continuous or discrete? How the atomist error was born 

Thomas Nail

Quantum gravity is of enormous importance. According to its proponents, it stands poised to show the world that the ultimate fabric of nature (space-time) is not continuous at all, but granular, and fundamentally discrete. The atomist legacy might finally be secured, despite its origins in an interpretive error.

There is just one nagging problem: quantum field theory claims that all discrete quanta of energy (particles) are merely the excitations or fluctuations in completely continuous quantum fields. Fields are not fundamentally granular. For quantum field theory, everything might be made of granules, but all granules are made of folded-up continuous fields that we simply measure as granular. This is what physicists call ‘perturbation theory’: the discrete measure of that which is infinitely continuous and so ‘perturbs one’s complete discrete measurement’, as Frank Close puts it in The Infinity Puzzle (2011). Physicists also have a name for the sub-granular movement of this continuous field: ‘vacuum fluctuations’. Quantum fields are nothing but matter in constant motion (energy and momentum). They are therefore never ‘nothing’, but more like a completely positive void (the flux of the vacuum itself) or an undulating ocean (appropriately called ‘the Dirac sea’) in which all discrete things are its folded-up bubbles washed ashore, as Carlo Rovelli puts it in Reality Is Not What it Seems (2016). Discrete particles, in other words, are folds in continuous fields.

The answer to the central question at the heart of modern science, ‘Is nature continuous or discrete?’ is as radical as it is simple. Space-time is not continuous because it is made of quantum granules, but quantum granules are not discrete because they are folds of infinitely continuous vibrating fields. Nature is thus not simply continuous, but an enfolded continuum.

This brings us right back to Lucretius and our original error. Working at once within and against the atomist tradition, Lucretius put forward the first materialist philosophy of an infinitely continuous nature in constant flux and motion. Things, for Lucretius, are nothing but folds (duplex), pleats (plex), bubbles or pores (foramina) in a single continuous fabric (textum) woven by its own undulations. Nature is infinitely turbulent or perturbing, but it also washes ashore, like the birth of Venus, in meta-stable forms – as Lucretius writes in the opening lines of De Rerum Natura: ‘Without you [Venus] nothing emerges into the sunlit shores of light.’ It has taken 2,000 years, but perhaps Lucretius has finally become our contemporary.

More on his thinking here:

Returning to Lucretius

Thomas Nail

...Nature is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Not flows of a single substance but nature as an ongoing process. Discrete “things” [rerum] are composed of corporeal flows [corpora] that move together [conflux] and fold over themselves [nexus] in a woven knotwork [contextum]. For Lucretius, things, only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Relative discreteness is a product of folded flux, not the other way around.

Lucretius’ description of matter alternates interchangeably between several words, none of which necessarily refer to discrete unchanging eternal particles: māteriēs (matters), primordia (first-threads), corpora (body), semine (seeds, sprouts, or shoots). This is an interesting methodology for any materialist to define matter so heterogeneously. Lucretius thus follows the Homeric and poetic tradition of not adhering to a single fixed ideal concept and instead describes material processes with a variety of contextual words precisely because matter is a process of transformation. In Homer there is rarely a “single word” used in every case to describe similar processes. 

Lucretius also describes the soul as a process of “weaving” [nexam] (3.217). Lucretius’ description of the soul as something woven is no coincidence. Poetry from Minoan Crete to Homer is frequently described as an act of weaving.

Since the soul and body come into being with their matters “woven” [inplexis] (3.331) together and “roots” [radicibus] (3.325) growing together, they are also “unwoven” or “untied” [dissolu-antur] (3.330) together as well. Since the soul and body are in constant motion, then it follows that the soul is always weaving. However, it also follows that if all movement is also death, then the soul’s movement is also an unweaving as well: death. Weaving, then, just like the movement of the “first-threads” [primordia], is both creative and destructive at the same time. There is no binary opposition here, not even an alternation. Living is dying, and dying is living. The two are united in the same kinetic process.

A recent post by Nail:

Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime

The black hole is an excellent example of the materialist sublime. Nature and matter are not passive or deterministic. They are indeterminate material processes. They perform precisely the sublime that Kant restricts to humans alone. Black holes are not infinitely dense singularities. At the heart of a black hole is a specific (and very small) spatio-temporal region measured by the Planck scale and related to the size of the black hole (its Schwarzschild radius). However, and more importantly, below the Planck level of the black hole there are quantum processes that produce the spacetime of that region. These quantum processes below the Planck unit are fundamentally indeterminate—meaning that they are neither in one spacetime or another. They are the indeterminate material conditions for the emergence of spacetime itself (quantum gravity).

In other words, nature is not just the passive conditions for the human experience of its own aesthetic faculties of beauty or the sublime but itself performs the sublime activity of radical indeterminism without concrete form. Humans have the experience of sublimity only because nature is already performatively and materially sublime.