Friday, March 11, 2011

Energy itself is pixelated


Energy itself is pixelated, like zooming in so far on a digital image that you see it's made of colored squares, or compressing an MP3 until the sound quality degrades.
Check it out:

Planck constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "This inherent granularity is counterintuitive in the everyday world, where it is possible to 'make things a little bit hotter' or 'move things a little bit faster', This is because the quanta of energy are very, very small in comparison to everyday human experience. Thus, on the macro scale quantum mechanics and classical physics converge. Nevertheless, it is impossible, as Planck found out, to explain some phenomena without accepting that energy is quantized; that is, it can only equal certain energy levels with space in between them."

I wonder what Schrödinger's cat thinks of that?