a different perspecive on physics

Space dilation happens because the patterns caused by high speed travel cause the 3D grid pattern to become unstable and the illusion that dimensions exist breaks down.

In special relativity all inertial reference frames are equivalent, even those moving at 99% of lightspeed. None is more unstable than the other, all physics works exactly the same. Good luck reproducing that with any kind of grid. You'd be more likely to get some kind of waves that propagate at fixed speed along the grid, giving you a privileged rest frame, like in the old discredited theories of aether.

Quantum effects happen when patterns (particles) spread across nodes that still have connections between them besides those connections that make up the primary 3D grid.

Explain Grover's algorithm then. How the hell can I guess a black-box secret with n possibilities using only sqrt(n) attempts. Hidden connections aren't enough, quantum physics allows more computation as well.

Also hidden connections would make FTL communication possible, which it isn't. You'd better learn how entanglement works. Two distant observers can't use it to communicate, but when they come together later and compare notes, it makes them go "hmm that's spooky". It's a very delicate middle ground. I wrote up a short example sometime ago, maybe it'll help.

More generally, don't try to come up with physical theories if you don't wanna learn physics. Knowing physics will let you come up with ten such "new perspectives" before breakfast and do some useful work besides. They will be crazier too. How about the holographic universe? Or Wheeler's idea that all electrons have the same properties because they're the same electron going back and forth in time? In comparison, most ideas coming from non-physicists are painfully boring (not to mention wrong).

This is not really a theory. I am not making predictions, I provide no concrete math, and this idea is not really falsifiable in its most generic forms. Why do I still think it is useful? Because it is a new way of looking at physics, and because it makes everything so much more easy and intuitive to understand, and makes all the contradictions go away.

Let's compare it with an alternative theory that there are invisible magical wee beasties all around who make the physics actually work by pushing, pulling, and dragging all the stuff. And "there are alternative interpretations for explaining relativity and quantum physics under this perspective" -- sometimes the wee beasties find magic mushrooms and eat them.

• Not making predictions? Check.
• No concrete math? Check.
• Not really falsifiable? Check.
• New way of looking at physics? Check (sufficiently so).
• So much more easy and intuitive to understand? Check.
• Makes all the contradictions go away? Check.
• Not a theory, but a new perspective? Check.

It's a tie! But the beasties are cuter, so they win.

I only skimmed this post, but I want to point out that most computational physics (and engineering) uses discretized space and time much as you've described. This is not new, just how things are often computed in practice.

Whether or not reality is discrete in this sense is beyond my knowledge as an engineer, but I have had conversations with physicists about this. (As I recall, it's possible, but the spatial and temporal resolution would be very small.)

Also, there are some exact solutions for discretized physics like this, but in general it's harder to do. Plus, because physical laws tend to be written in continuous form, very few people look for exact solutions like this.

makes all the contradictions go away

Not really. In computational fluid dynamics, converting to discrete equations can introduce major problems. One important problem is conservation. Depending on how you formulate your discrete equations, mass, energy, etc., may be no longer conserved and might not even be approximately conserved. "Equivalent" continuous equations would not have the same problem. And I would not say solving this problem is trivial by any means, though I know at least one way to do it.

Seems to me you are trying to replace the "infinite precision" by something else, without actually addressing the things that made people assume "infinite precision" in the first place.

I mean that fact that this universe doesn't behave like one built on a grid, but instead if you rotate things by a random angle, move them by a random distance, or even put everything on a platform moving uniformly in a random direction, the experiments keep running the same way.

If your hypothesis is that on the particle level the grid is already too coarse-grained so that weird things happen, then particles moving differently in different angles is among those things that should happen. Also, particles behaving differently when they are on a moving platform, such as the planet Earth.

I think Wolfram proposes almost exactly this in "A New Kind of Science" (which also borders on crackpottishness).

Looks similar to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity

That is to say, reality at a point of time

Nope. Time is inside reality, remember? You cannot have a single defined time for all reality.

I believe it's a beautiful idea that doesn't obey the second law of thermodynamics. I like it because it's a different paradigm on the link between information and reality, based on boolean projections and topology. However the thermodynamic cost of erasing de-entangles bits at quantum scale would be enormous. There is not enough noise into the system to cool it down. In that respect, it might have value as a pre Big-Bang hypothesis but from what I can tell it will release energy at plank scale instantly.

"There is no contradiction between quantum physics and relativity if the very concept of distance is unreliable", that is correct, but we exists at the "sweet spot" right between them. You could say distance can not be unreliable because Maxwell's equations are differential.

A section of three dimensional space can be modelled as a cubic grid with nodes where the edges intersect, up to some limited resolution for a cube of finite volume ( and I suppose the same holds true with more than three dimensions ). It sounds as if you're proposing this graph basically be flattened - you take a fully connected regular polygon of n^3 angles, map the nodes in your cube to your polygon and then delete all edges in the connected polygon that don't correspond to an edge present in the cube.

I have further questions but they hinge on whether or not I've understood you correctly., Is the above so far a fair summary?

You might like the book "The End of Time" by Julian Barbour. It's about an alternative view of physics where you rearrange all of the equations to not include time. The book describes the result sort of similarly to what you're suggesting, where the system is defined as the relationship between things and the evolution of those relationships and not precise locations and times.

This (at least your concrete description) seems inconsistent with the theory of relativity, since it has "points of time" with fully defined realities at those points. This is more like Newtonian absolute time.