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If the optics are good enough and the magnification is high enough, the Airy disk might be visible. It forms a limit to the resolution of the telescope.
Most telescope don't resolve to the Airy disk limit. If the object is a galaxy, it automatically isn't a point source, and if it is far away the light might have to pass through gravitational fields that cause gravitational lensing. All this will ruin the chance of seeing the Airy disk. However, since the telescope is apparently resolving to the Airy disk limit, the distant galactic light source is acting sufficiently like a point source.
In any case, we are dealing with the useful fiction [model] of photons, which might be wavelike or particlelike depending how they are being perceived. We'll need something more sensitive to detect quantized time.
If time is quantized like the energy of photons, there should be a certain minimum measurable quanta of time, called a "Planck time"
Why does the quantization of gravity imply the quantization of time? I've never heard it stated that way before. My understanding is that the sense in which the Planck time can be said to be a "quantum" of time is different from the sense in which a photon can be said to be a quantum of electromagnetism.
If light is quantized, it might have minute speed differences that we cannot measure.
Light is certainly quantized. But what does "it might have minute speed differences" mean? Differences from what?
If photons emitted from a source at the same instant have tiny speed differences, the light waves will arrive at Earth with different phases.
If the photons have different velocities, they should have different frequencies, but in that case, they can't remain in phase at all. But assuming that two photons from a distant galaxy have exactly the same frequency, why should they be in phase? They weren't emitted in phase.
Without quantum time, the universe becomes mathematically uglier at the moment of its inception.
Without knowing what that mathematical description is, who can say whether it's ugly? The universe is the way it is, and not how we might wish it to be.
An extremely poor description of Planck's results. It would be better to say that QM was born out of an interpolation formula. There was no "leap of faith" only a (much) better explanation.
Planck invented a forumla that interpolates between low and high frequency black-box radiation behavior. The results of the formula were so good, that Planck asked the question, what physical mechanism could describe his formula. The rest is History.
Otherwise the article seems a reasonable description of things.
Would this not require finding a galaxy which is exactly normal to the line of sight?...
A 'tilted' galaxy may be 100000 light-years wide; hence the light from the far edge is under no constraint to be 'in phase' with the light from the near edge.
I've always been a little confused as to why "nearby" galaxies such as Andromeda do not look "smeared", since the light from more distant parts does not represent a true 'snapshot' of how the galaxy looked when the light from the nearer parts was emitted. Probably a stupid question, but I ask a lot of stupid questions.
--Boris
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)