Is Time Discrete or Continuous?

Time certainly appears continuous, but there are some theories which suggest that time is not unlike the grains of sand pouring through an hourglass. That is, time may be discrete. An easy analogy to this would be pouring sand from a cup versus pouring water from a cup. It is easy to see that the sand is made from individual grains, therefore it is discrete. The water appears to be a continuous flow, and therefore it appears continuous. With water, it appears that your could always take half of the amount that you started with, but with sand you clearly can see that you would get to that last grain of sand, and you couldn't then split that in half.

What is interesting is that when you think about your physical science class from middle school, you learned that water was made of really small things called water molecules. You may have thought of water as being continuous, but it was in fact discrete. So what does this have to do with time? Well, everything. Time appears to be continuous because the discrete units of time are so small, they are indistinguishable to us. Disclaimer* This is theoretical physics, but there are some logical reasons as to why this makes sense. For example, look no further than a film or a GIF. The animation appears to be a moving image, something continuous, but it is actually made of individual pictures, which are discrete.