Spacetime certainly isn’t made of the crude voxels we use to simulate tomorrow’s weather, which is one of the reasons why weather forecasts are often inaccurate. Yet this idea that there’s a bunch of numbers at each point in spacetime is quite deep, and I think it’s telling us something not merely about our description of reality, but about reality itself. One of the most fundamental concepts in modern physics is that of a field, which is just this: something represented by numbers at each point in spacetime. For example, there’s a temperature field corresponding to the air around you: there’s
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