How is the “Plank Length” the absolute limit of how small something can be?
In: Physics
It’s not how small something can be, it’s how small we can see. To see something the wavelength of what were looking with has to be smaller than what we want to observe. Otherwise, the wave can just cruise on by unaffected, and to us observers an unaffected wave means “I didn’t see anything happen”.
At extremely small scales, we stop being able to do that forever. We need to get so much energy into what we’re using to look at what happens that E=mc^(2) becomes noticeable and we’re pumping mass into what we want to observe. At the Planck length we need so much energy to observe what’s there that we’ve added enough mass that it becomes a black hole, and by definition we can’t see what happens in a black hole.
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