I’m not really into physics and what not, I just know the bare minimum. I’m a law student, so please believe I’m like 5 when it comes to this discipline of education.
Why is the Planck Length the “smallest thing in the world?” Or at least I hope I asked it right.
I’ve read that you cannot go smaller than this length, otherwise blackholes will occur and the world doesn’t make sense anymore.
Could you explain the main steps to understanding “length” and it’s relationship to energy before diving into the planks length? This concept is super interesting and I really want to understand it. From what I have read, understanding this concept is broken down like this:
(1) What is a wavelength actually?
(2) How are wavelengths and energy related?
(3) Why is the Plancks Length the smallest thing in the universe?
(4) What happens when something is smaller than a Planck Length?
Thanks!
In: Physics
1) picture a regular wavy line, google ‘sinusoid’ to get the right idea.
The line wiggles up and down, creating a series of ‘bumps’. All the ‘bumps’ pointing up, we call ‘peaks’ (like a mountain peak), the ones pointing down we call ‘troughs’ (like a pit animals eat from).
The wavelength is the distance between one peak and its nearest other peak, if you measure it with a ruler. It’s the length of one ‘cycle’ of the wave.
The wavelength tells you how big a single ‘cycle’ of a wave is.
2) waves with shorter wavelengths carry more energy. It takes more energy to pack those wave cycles closer together.
Waves also have a feature called ‘frequency’ which is related to wavelength.
The ‘frequency’ is the number of cycles that pass a specific point in a period of 1 second.
Frequency x wavelength = the speed of the wave.
For light, which always has the same speed called ‘c’, wavelength x frequency = c.
The energy carried by a wave of light is just its frequency multiplied by a constant, called ‘Planck’s Constant’, denoted by the letter ‘h’.
A wave with double the frequency carries double the energy.
Energy = frequency x h
Energy = h x (c/wavelength)
Waves carry energy from one place to another.
Sound, light, ocean waves, earthquakes and tremors (seismic waves), they’re all described in this same way.
3) the planck length isn’t exactly the smallest ‘possible’ unit of length.
There are other good comments explaining it better than I could do.
4) we don’t really know. It’s hard to test our current theories of physics on scales that small.
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