Spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in the same way that information can be

Abstract

There are competing schools of thought about the question of whether spacetime is fundamentally continuous or discrete. Here, we consider the possibility that spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in the same mathematical way that information can be simultaneously continuous and discrete. The equivalence of continuous information and discrete information, which is of key importance in signal processing, is established by the Shannon sampling theory: for any band-limited signal, it suffices to record discrete samples to be able to perfectly reconstruct it everywhere, if the samples are taken at a rate of at least twice the band limit. It is known that physical fields on generic curved spaces obey a sampling theorem if they possess an ultraviolet cutoff. Most recently, methods of spectral geometry have been employed to show that also the very shape of a curved space (i.e. of a Riemannian manifold) can be discretely sampled and then reconstructed up to the cutoff scale. Here, we develop these results further and also consider the generalization to curved spacetimes, i.e. to Lorentzian manifolds. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.