How does physics break down when you go smaller than plank’s length? Why cant you just go like half a plan’s length or a quarter of plank’s length?

Question

How does physics break down when you go smaller than plank’s length? Why cant you just go like half a plan’s length or a quarter of plank’s length?

In: Physics

Answer 1

It’s not physics that breaks, it’s our ability to see what’s happening that breaks. To see smaller and smaller events, we need to use higher and higher energy particles since it’s impossible to see something smaller than the wavelength. A photon energetic enough to “see” a Planck length has so much mass (remember that E=mc^(2) goes both ways) that it would form a Planck length sized black hole, and by definition we can’t see what happens in a black hole.