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I do not know how to use professional words to ask my question, so I will try to use a layman language. Please bear with me for a moment.

A ROUGH GUESS

The world our eyes are seeing every moment is a picture reflected in our eyes. I guess our eyes are like cameras, that are taking pictures "continually". I suppose there is a frequency in this picture taking. Say it is 1/10000s, the time it takes a picture, let's assume it is negligible. Something like that.

THE QUESTION

My question is, if we take a picture at 0/10000s, 1/10000s, 2/10000s, etc. How do I know that between the time 1/10000s and 2/10000s, the world exists?

So now:

  1. If my guess is wrong, then what is the real picture? What is happening in reality?
  2. If my guess is correct, how do we know the world exists continually? How would you use experimental methods to prove it? Or there might be theoretically, many worlds in our time gaps coexisting with ours?

EDIT

I feel I still have not got a satisfied answer for my first question. Could anyone explain to me: is our vision equipment (i.e., our eyes) functioning continually or discretely?

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  • $\begingroup$ Ah, I see, quantum theory are not that far from our laymen. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel
    Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 16:19
  • $\begingroup$ How do you know the Earth existed before you where born? $\endgroup$
    – jinawee
    Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 16:39
  • $\begingroup$ @jinawee it didn't. The world was created specifically for me and when I die, it shall end $\endgroup$
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 16:41
  • $\begingroup$ See my edit and please have some tolerance on duplicates. Thanks:) $\endgroup$
    – Daniel
    Commented Nov 25, 2014 at 0:45

3 Answers 3

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Quite a philosophical approach. There is still the reliance on our four other senses in order to make sense of our physical world, however the same approach can be imply to those senses also with the delay in neurological impulses.

One must also take into account, as you would call it, the in between frames of other people's perceptions, as well as those of other more sensitive instruments than the human eye. However the theory is an eligible one, seeing as although it can not be proven, it is also difficult to disprove.

Just be a stickler, the human eye and brain can interpret about a 1000 frames per second. I would have left this in a comment yet sadly my reputation doesn't allow me to.

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Fortunately for experiments in physics we have better proxies than the accuracies of our five senses. We have detectors and computers and ....

With these tools a theory of how the universe is made has been developed, from elementary particles with the theory of quantum mechanics building up the observables around us, to the astrophysical models that fit the observations with newtonian mechanics and general relativity.

The theories have been validated over and over again with experiments. Discretization of space time would particularly involve violations of Lorenz invariance, and this has not been seen. Within the limits of experimental measurements discreteness of space time is no go as a proposition, though there are important people working similar lines , as G 't Hooft.

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According to quantum mechanics the time evolution of the universe is described by a path integral that will sum over all histories. If we consider a robot whose processor runs at a clock cycle of $\tau$ to simplify things, then all the possible time evolutions during that period of $\tau$ will contribute to explain the robot's observations, including the Moon changing to green cheese and back again within that time interval of $\tau$. However such strange histories only make extremely negligible contributions to the path integral.

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