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- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!firth
- From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
- Subject: Re: Lowneheim-Skolem theorem (was: Continuos vs. discrete models)
- Message-ID: <1992Nov18.133219.6664@sei.cmu.edu>
- Organization: Software Engineering Institute
- References: <1992Nov17.124233.24312@oracorp.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 13:32:19 GMT
- Lines: 17
-
- In article <1992Nov17.124233.24312@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
-
- >LS doesn't demand that we adopt Paul Budnik's discretized physics, but
- >I believe it gives us permission to do so. LS shows that there can
- >never be a demonstration that space-time must be continuous, because
- >there is no property of an uncountable set that doesn't also hold of
- >some countable set.
-
- Necessary, but not, I fear, sufficient. If you are to replace the
- continuum with a *single* discrete manifold, then you must show that,
- for any uncountable set with certain properties, there exists a
- *single* countable set with all the same properties.
-
- I freely grant that we still have trouble defining a single continuous
- manifold that accommodates all our favourite theories (like GR and QM),
- but I can't see how dropping the assumption of continuity will make
- this problem any easier to solve.
-