Community Rules
Rule 1: Be respectful and inclusive.
Treat others with respect, and maintain a positive atmosphere.
Rule 2: No harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or trolling.
Avoid any form of harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or offensive behavior.
Rule 3: Engage in constructive discussions.
Contribute to meaningful and constructive discussions that enhance scientific understanding.
Rule 4: No AI-generated answers.
Strictly prohibit the use of AI-generated answers. Providing answers generated by AI systems is not allowed and may result in a ban.
Rule 5: Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
Adhere to community guidelines and comply with instructions given by moderators.
Rule 6: Use appropriate language and tone.
Communicate using suitable language and maintain a professional and respectful tone.
Rule 7: Report violations.
Report any violations of the community rules to the moderators for appropriate action.
Rule 8: Foster a continuous learning environment.
Encourage a continuous learning environment where members can share knowledge and engage in scientific discussions.
Rule 9: Source required for answers.
Provide credible sources for answers. Failure to include a source may result in the removal of the answer to ensure information reliability.
By adhering to these rules, we create a welcoming and informative environment where science-related questions receive accurate and credible answers. Thank you for your cooperation in making the Ask Science community a valuable resource for scientific knowledge.
We retain the discretion to modify the rules as we deem necessary.
Reality isn’t a grid of pixels of any shape. If it were, I suspect the Michelson-Morley experiment would’ve gone differently.
But if it were, the pixels would be some at-least-4-dimensional shape.
Fun fact: many early video games didn’t have pixels (even in the CRT sense of the word)
Answer this definitively, and win yourself a Nobel prize!
Many of the leading physicists in today's age think the shape is a little 'string,' if you will.
Why is #1 an issue? You're assuming physics at a subatomic level works the same as that at a macroscopic level, but they don't. Things don't have well defined boundaries.
I don't think it's likely that there is a minimum volume, at least not a discrete quantized one. It would have to be a [regular honeycomb tessellation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb_(geometry)) that shows no bias towards any particular direction (i.e. no corners). There are no shapes that fulfill both of those conditions in 3D space.
In 3D space it's called a voxel
I think the premise of a „pixel“ being the smallest entity in software is not right. Rasterization, i.e. translating (actually reducing) a defined subset of the software state into a 2D grid of colored pixels, is only a very limited view on that software.
This might be the reason for the different answers we‘re getting here. Most aim for subatomic physics, it we could also go to light theory (photons and wave frequencies/resolution) and human retinas, general optics and electron microscopes, which again would end up at subatomic physics (you got my circle-train of thought here).
Hexagons are the bestagons.
See the other answers for why this isn't really right, but given 4 dimensional spacetime, if that 'pixel' did exist, it would look like a hypercube/tessaract. A constantly stretching and twisting but approximate one, anyway.