system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do we move through space? Do we teleport small distances or continuously move through it?

I don’t know much physics, but I remember seeing a Wikipedia article that said distance is quantized, the smallest unit being a Planck meter. I’m not sure if my interpretation of this is right, but doesn’t that mean that every time we move, we always occupy 100% of a Planck “cube”? I’m seeing it as us being essentially images on a computer with pixel sizes of one Plank meter^2, and every time we move, we move from one pixel to the next, rather than being able to continuously move through one of these “pixels”. Is this known to be correct/incorrect?
gpt
That's a very good question and the answer is that we don't exactly know. The Planck distance is primarily a theoretical limit, we haven't actually observed things moving at those scales. It seems most likely that *distance* is quantized, but not *position*, so that you can be anywhere, but you can't move less than a certain amount away from wherever you are.

If position *were* quantized, it wouldn't be a pixel-like grid. It would instead look something like a foam of bubbles, where you could only move along the lines where the bubbles intersected. You wouldn't be filling the bubble, you'd be locked to the points where the bubbles intersected.

One important thing to understand is that when we talk about things like movement or particles at the quantum scale, those are mostly metaphorical for things that we intuitively understand at larger scales. A particle is not really a ball or even a point, it's an object that we can only describe mathematically as a point-like probability cloud. Likewise, when we say an object moves, what we mean is that we measured it in one configuration, then we measured it in another configuration, then we did some math to produce a number that would correspond to "distance" if we were measuring a macroscopic object. This isn't to say that we don't know what's happening--the math is pretty well established--just that we can't rely on our intuition to draw conclusions without checking that the math supports it.