**We don't know time is continuous at small scales. But I don't think anyone claims it is.**

You have asked several questions. But *Is time real?* does not seem to be one of them

(1) **Is time continuous at small scales?** 
 
Experience tells us time seems to be continuous at large scales, but that might just be a consequence of it being divided into very small *frames* too small to measure with current instruments. 
 

For example matter seems continuous at large scales -- like you can keep chopping a block of cheese in half forever -- but on closer inspection the cheese is not continuous. It is broken into atoms and there is a smallest possible amount of cheese you can have.


General relativity relies on time being continuous (at large scales) and gives accurate predictions. This however says nothing about the small scale physics where GR stops being useful. In my experience most mathematicians and scientist only see the continuousness as a useful mathematical tool and not a 100% accurate desciption of reality.

At small scales the properties of space behave strangely. The uncertainty principle from Quantum Mechanics tells us that the exact position of an object has no physical meaning. There are just degrees of *certainty*. Another problem is it sometimes becomes meaningless to say which of two atoms is which. 
 
So it would not surprise me if the small scale structure of time also behaves strangely. Maybe not discrete, but probably not continuous. Say once you zoom in close enough it becomes meaningless to give the exact moment an event happened. 
 
 

(2) **If time is continuous can we prove it?**

Probably not. Any experimental setup will only have finite precision. One might verify time does not behave as though it is broken into 0.0000001 nanosecond chunks. But then what about 0.0000000001 nanosecond chunks?

There is also the foundational issue of what you should compare to in order to establish a temporally continuous universe. We set up the experiment such that if the universe is temporally continuous we get outcome X and otherwise we get outcome Y. It's unclear (and perhaps meaningless) how you would predict the behaviour of an experiment in a universe that by definition does not exist.

(3) **Is time coherent?**

I am not sure what this means. But I will point out that even if there was discrete time, it does not rule out coherence in the sense that each moment influences the next. It's just the influence looks different.