Why “continuous reality” has been misunderstood for a century

Physicists often divide the world into two possible ontologies:

1. Discrete: reality comes in quanta — of space, time, energy.

2. Continuous: reality is a smooth, seamless, infinitely divisible continuum.

When physicists speak about non-discreteness, they usually mean the second option:

a single, seamless, infinitely fine sheet of discrete reality,

just with the limit of the quantum set to zero.

In other words:

continuity = a discretum taken to the limit of infinite density.

This is the classical worldview:

• Discrete → pixels

• Continuous → pixels packed infinitely close

• Reality → one of the two

But this dichotomy is false.

We propose a third ontology — one that physics has never named:

Fluidity is not infinite discreteness.

Fluidity is interdiscreteness.

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Interdiscreteness: the third ontology

If discreteness refers to the quanta of time and space,

then interdiscreteness refers to what lies between the quanta:

• not-time,

• not-space,

• not-distance,

• not-duration.

These are not “empty gaps.”

They are structural regions with their own properties, neither temporal nor spatial, but foundational to both.

Fluidity, in this new picture, is not a continuum made of infinitely small Planck tiles.

Fluidity is what happens when:

the between-structure (interdiscrete)

dominates over the discrete structure (quantum).

This is a radical reversal:

• Classical physics: continuity is infinite discreteness

• Our proposal: continuity is interdiscreteness

The difference is not semantic — it is ontological.

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Why this changes everything

If fluidity is interdiscreteness, not continuum:

1. Time does not “flow.”

It emerges from the interdiscrete substrate.

Its apparent smoothness is a byproduct of interdiscrete dominance.

2. Space is not a container.

It is the visible crust formed when interdiscrete structure supports discrete relations.

3. Nonlocality becomes intuitive.

Interdiscreteness is already non-temporal and non-spatial.

Two regions embedded in the same interdiscrete zone share zero spatial metric.

4. Quantum weirdness stops being weird.

Superposition, entanglement, tunneling —

these are signatures of the interdiscrete, not defects of the discrete.

5. Fluctuations and “experimental anomalies” gain context.

Identical experiments differ because the interdiscrete state differs.

Physics has been measuring only half the ontology.

6. Continuity and discreteness are no longer opposites.

They are orthogonal layers:

• Discreteness = visible quanta

• Interdiscreteness = the invisible substrate between quanta

• Fluidity = structure when the substrate dominates

7. Temporodynamics becomes natural, not speculative.

If time trembles, it must be trembling between something —

between discrete time and interdiscrete non-time.

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Why physicists missed this

Because for 100 years, the implicit assumption was:

If reality is not discrete, then it is continuous —

and continuity means “infinitely subdivided discreteness.”

No one asked the forbidden question:

“What lies between the quanta?”

Modern physics quantized the world —

but never qualified the inter-quantum structure.

Even loop quantum gravity, digital physics, causal sets —

all discretize spacetime,

yet assume the “between” is empty or nonexistent.

They quantized the nodes

but did not model the inter-nodes.

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Fluidity as Interdiscreteness: the core insight

Fluidity is not smoothness.

Fluidity is:

• the regime where interdiscreteness governs behavior,

• the dominance of the non-temporal, the non-spatial,

• a mode of reality where the between-region is primary,

• an ontology where discreteness is secondary and emergent.

This is why fluidity feels different than discreteness:

because it is different.

Not the limit of discreteness,

but the presence of something the discrete cannot describe.

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Why this matters

Because any theory built exclusively on discrete or continuous models

will always hit the same walls:

• nonlocality,

• measurement anomalies,

• dark matter/energy,

• vacuum fluctuations,

• identical experiments producing divergent results,

• limits of classical and quantum computation.

Interdiscreteness provides the missing structural layer

that can hold all these phenomena without contradiction.

Fluidity is not a continuum.

Fluidity is the interdiscrete field revealing itself.

And once we understand this field,

we may discover that what we call “reality” —

the visible, measurable, discrete portion —

was always just the thin crust on top of something far deeper.