I know it’s only theoretical, but why couldn’t something be just slightly smaller?
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Planck length and Planck time are not the *smallest possible* distance/time, they are the smallest distance/time *at which our understanding of physics still holds*.
The Planck length is about 10^-20 times the diameter of a proton, so its obscenely small. Its speculated that interactions at this scale will be dominated by quantum gravity which we really don’t have any model for yet so you can’t really apply our physics at this scale.
The Planck length is wayyyy below the point where you can call anything a “particle”, they’re manifestations of wavefunctions and its just brain hurty from here. An electron is 10^-18 meters and the Planck length is 10^-35 meters so consider the scale of an electron relative to a meter stick, now blow that electron up to be a meter wide, the Plank length is as tiny relative to an electron as an electron is to a meter stick
Important thing to learn from the Planck length – if you are reading physics news from a general news site, its wrong. At least get it from a tech news site which some basic physics background
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