Spacetime is self-similar

[bascule]

As this seems to be the forum for idiots to spout off half-baked ideas, I figured I'd chime in with my own two cents.

 

So I recently (in the past 6 months or so) read Lee Smolin's now outdated book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. The central theme of his book is that spacetime is discrete and is probably best modeled by forms like spin networks or spin foam. But Smolin's book is, at this point, some 7 years old and not exactly representative of the state of the art in modern physics.

 

The "traditional" approach involves a continuous spacetime. There are no discrete structures, there's nothing special going on at the scale of the Planck length, and spacetime contains increasingly smaller structures at any given scale.

 

What if there were a compromise between these two possibilities? What if spacetime demonstrates self-similarity at the Planck scale? What if we found structures at the Planck scale which are similar to other scales? This is a configuration typically referred to as a fractal. So perhaps a better question is: what if spacetime is made of fractals?

[Tsadi]

What do you mean by spacetime is fractal?

[YT2095]

As this seems to be the forum for idiots to spout off half-baked ideas

 

well... if it wasn`t before, it certainly is now!

[Sisyphus]

I'm not sure I understand the difference between the "traditional approach" and the suggested compromise.