This is my favourite quote from one of the books I’ve been reading over the vacation, Hans Christian von Baeyer‘s Information: The New Language of Science:

Why does nature seem granular, discontinuous, quantized into discrete chunks like sand – instead of smooth and continuous like water?

The answer is that while we have no idea how the world is really arranged, and shouldn’t even ask, we do know that knowledge of the world is information; and since information is naturally quantized into bits, the world also appears quantized.

If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.