**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

This is curious. Surely it's not "losing" energy, it's just being spread out?

To where? It's one of the only things I know of that isn't rigorously following the conservation of energy by some known mechanisms.

Kinetic energy is only half the story. The sum of kinetic energy and potential energy is universal. Kinetic energy and potential energy are the same thing viewed from different frames of reference. We might disagree on how much kinetic energy an object has, and we might disagree how much potential energy it has, but we won't disagree on the sum of both.

As for if it's quantised, well let's move on to this...

The point stands that kinetic energy isn't quantized. Kinetic and Potential Energy are properties of systems, not individual objects.
What you've argued is that since the total energy is constant and kinetic energy is not quantized, then at least 1 other energy is not quantized as well.

Distance loses meaning at sub-Planck scales. It might be the case that the Planck length IS the minimum possible distance. This seems like an open question in physics, so I'm not sure how you can say with certainty that distance isn't quantised.

Because we do not see crystal artifacts when we look into space across any time/distance scales.

We would? Why?

Because the reason we see artifacts when looking through crystals is exactly the fact that the geometry of the crystal's atomic structure quantizes the spacial degrees of freedom. It implies geometric structures like planes and holes. When a wave bounces off a crystal, it has a probabilistic chance to bounce off of any of the implied planes in the crystal lattice. Those planes are not all parallel. Imagine a square grid. Lines at 0 or 90 degrees are implied lines, but also lines of integer fraction slopes are implied lines. Same in 3D.

This is a purely geometric property of waves. If they cannot propagate through a continuous medium, they will diffract or reflect. Any geometric lack of homogeneity imparts a change to the way waves propagate through that medium.

So what we'd see looking at the sky would be weird spikes and dots and diffraction based on the quantized geometry of the space through which the waves propagate. That would tell us the nature of the quantized space. Much like we use gravitational lensing to tell us about parts of space that we cannot directly observe.

E.g. the bullet cluster. We see gravitational lensing though we do not see the source of the mass. That geometric lack of homogeneity is something we can detect.