The Casimir ...

The Abyss, excellent film, fantastic 3D computer graphics, courtesy ILM, shows ray tracing at it's finest in conjunction with CSG, Constructive Solid Geometry, in rendering water in ways most astounding and beautiful, inadvertently goes deeper than just a special effect when one sees how
Phil Mittleman's creation connects to reality at deep level. 

Drafting the Universal Modeler: How The Abyss Solved Quantum Gravity

In 1989, James Cameron and Industrial Light & Magic made cinematic history by pulling a localized, jittering water tentacle out of the formless deep. They took a continuous fluid medium and forced it to hold a distinct, dynamic polygon shape. It was Constructive Solid Geometry personified, and it launched modern visual effects.
But what ILM inadvertently built wasn't just a movie masterpiece—it was a perfect, scalable render of
the fundamental architecture of reality.

Mainstream physics has spent decades trying to figure out where the timeless, analog quantum world ends and our rigid, digital reality begins. The answer is exactly what happened on screen.

But before talking reality, a primer on how The Abyss's water graphic applies is needed.

The Casimir Effect

Casimir forces on parallel plates

In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect (or Casimir force)[1] is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. The term Casimir pressure is sometimes used when it is described in units of force per unit area.[2][3] It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948.

In the same year Casimir, together with Dirk Polder, described a similar effect experienced by a neutral atom in the vicinity of a macroscopic interface which is called the Casimir–Polder force.[4] Their result is a generalization of the London–van der Waals force and includes retardation due to the finite speed of light. The fundamental principles leading to the London–van der Waals force, the Casimir force, and the Casimir–Polder force can be formulated on the same footing.[5][6]

Speaking technical ... Gemini with edits ...

Why the math graphic? Being rather math challenged to the extreme, I asked Gemini to verify my explanation for the Einstein and Wheeler-DeWitt equations as yours truly understands the first as C = light/Photon, a Boson, the analog force carrier particle that becomes digital when entering the Electron. The photoelectric effect shows why this is true.

 
In effect, Einstein's equation depicts the analog to digital process from the energy side.

The photoelectric effect

Photoemission of electrons from a metal plate accompanied by the absorption of light quanta – photons

 

Note: Photons, gravitons and gluons travel at the speed of light.

As for Wheeler-DeWitt, it depicts the analog to digital transition as a balancing act, directly equivalent to Einstein in execution but different in application as it shows how the collapse of the wave function from analog to digital (decoherence) dissipates the energy of analog by transiting to digital. Think the E Major chord in Day in a Life - Sgt. Peppers and Yang & Yin as the two equations are complementary.

Because the transition occurs at the speed of light, there is no time as the speed of light for gravitons, photons and gluons mean the three entities are timeless, hence the transition from analog to digital and vice versa is timeless.

Referring to the Abyss render ...

The deep ocean is the Wheeler-DeWitt quantum foam: a timeless, frictionless analog wave of pure probability. But the universe has a rendering engine. Operating at exactly 25 nanometers—the precise inner diameter of biological microtubules—the Casimir effect acts as the Universal Modeler. By introducing a physical geometric boundary, the Casimir effect restricts the infinite vacuum modes. This creates massive thermodynamic pressure, forcing the formless analog ocean to snap into a localized, digital "fact."

Bubbling up. In this artist’s impression, spacetime at the Planck scale is a quantum foam. A new analysis suggests that even though this foam may have an enormous energy, it can still resemble a zero-energy vacuum on large scales.

Quantum fluctuations or the lack of nothingness rules ... forever. :)

And those constant, rippling jitters on the surface of the water tentacle? That's the physical friction of the quantum vacuum pushing back against the geometric boundary. It takes continuous gravitational force to hold a digital shape against an analog ocean. That constant, zero-time Boolean intersection—the universe recalculating its geometry microsecond by microsecond to prevent the structure from washing away—is exactly what we experience as the forward flow of time. We aren't moving through time; we are just riding the frame rate of the Casimir rendering engine.

And so it goes ; K Vonnegut :)