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Spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete in the same way that information can
There are competing schools of thought about the question of whether
spacetime is fundamentally either continuous or discrete. Here, we consider the
possibility that spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in
the same mathematical way that information can be simultaneously continuous and
discrete. The equivalence of continuous and discrete information, which is of
key importance in information theory, is established by Shannon sampling
theory: of any bandlimited signal it suffices to record discrete samples to be
able to perfectly reconstruct it everywhere, if the samples are taken at a rate
of at least twice the bandlimit. It is known that physical fields on generic
curved spaces obey a sampling theorem if they possess an ultraviolet cutoff.
Most recently, methods of spectral geometry have been employed to show that
also the very shape of a curved space (i.e., of a Riemannian manifold) can be
discretely sampled and then reconstructed up to the cutoff scale. Here, we
develop these results further, and we here also consider the generalization to
curved spacetimes, i.e., to Lorentzian manifolds