Had you performed your reading outside of PopSci, you would know that the "general establishment" does not agree with your interpretation of Planck units. In fact, even a cursory look at the Wikipedia page on Planck units would show you that some of the scales can obviously not be interpreted as some sort of limits of measurability.
A reasonable interpretation for the Planck length is that it gives the characteristic distance scale at which quantum effects to gravity become relevant. Given that all we currently have is a completely classical theory of gravity and an "unrelated" quantum field theory, even this amounts to an educated guess.
No observations have ever been made that would suggest that the underlying spacetime is discrete in any sense, shape or form. Please refrain from posting arrogant comments on topics in which you are out of your depth.
I, uh... What? Did you mean to respond to some other post there?
I can't see how anything you said is a response to anything I said. My statement was very simple: if two models predict the same result, you can use either of them. As far as we have worked out so far, continuous and discrete spacetime give the same results for every experiment we can run. If you have an experiment where they don't, physicists would really love to see it.
Firstly, my comment was overly antagonizing, sorry for that.
My problem is with the interpretation of Planck units; they really do not appear in current theories as signifying any theoretical lower limit to measurability, as I must interpret that you claim by saying:
> As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
For example, the Planck energy is a nice macroscopic quantity of approximately 2 gigajoules. For the Planck quantities that are more extreme, the measurement is not hampered by the theory but by practical issues.
Sure, we don't expect our theories to hold at Planck length, but this is not due to something that's baked into the Standard Model or general relativity.
A reasonable interpretation for the Planck length is that it gives the characteristic distance scale at which quantum effects to gravity become relevant. Given that all we currently have is a completely classical theory of gravity and an "unrelated" quantum field theory, even this amounts to an educated guess.
No observations have ever been made that would suggest that the underlying spacetime is discrete in any sense, shape or form. Please refrain from posting arrogant comments on topics in which you are out of your depth.