On the Discrete Reconciliation of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics*

Continuum (“classical”) physics rests on arbitrary units of mass, length and time; it is “scale invariant”. Modern physics is quantized. Dalton and Prout recognized that mass is quantized, Faraday and Thompson showed that electric charge is quantized and Planck and Einstein discovered that action is quantized. Once these three facts are grasped, the goal of physics should be to replace MLTphysics by counting in terms of these quantized values (or equivalent units) and to replace continuum mathematical physics by computer science. We sketch here how this might be done. The consequences of our “Discrete Physics”1j2 are summarized in Table 1. These have been obtained by postulating1 finiteness, discreteness, finite computability, absolute non-uniqueness and additivity. The fourth postulate is particularly important because it not only requires us to use “equal prior probability in the absence of specific cause” but also implies the concept of indistinguishability; for a related development of this idea, see Parker-Rhodes3.