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
The Planck length is literally nothing and completely meaningless. A lot of your other “answers” are complete bullshit, do not believe them. It has absolutely zero real world threshold or meaning. Pseudoscience “journalist” just blow it out of proportion as some special thing.
It’s just a number you get when you smash a couple constants together. Specifically the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the Planck constant, the Boltzmann constant, and the Coulomb constant. The Planck length is specifically the squareroot(h/G/c^3 ). That is h = Planck constant (reduced), G = gravitational constant, c = speed of light. Combining these constants this way happens to give you units of length. That’s all it is. End of story. There is literally nothing else to it. Anything anyone else is saying beyond this isn’t true and has no basis.
And you can get any unit from these, you just set these constants to equal 1 and see what pops out. The Planck mass for example is 0.02 milligrams. This is less than you, but more than one of your cells. It holds absolutely no physical limitation. Clearly, 0.02 mg has no significance, so expecting the Planck length to hold significance is complete nonsense and pseudoscience. If anyone tells you a Planck “whatever” is some fundamental limit, they are clueless.
So what is the Planck length them? Well, it’s an absurdly small length you get from throwing a few constants together. Unlike the Planck mass, it is way out of the realm of everyday human experience, and on the small side. Planck temperature on the other hand is also way out of everyday human realms, but on the high end. What significance does it hold? Well firstly, using the Planck length, and mass, and all the other Planck values is a unit system on its own. But because it is based on fundamental constant, those constants are 1. The speed of light is just 1 in Planck distance per Planck time. Kind of handy, better than metric in some situations where the speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. 1 is a lot nicer number for sure. Secondly, we know with absolutely certainty our laws of physics are wrong at the very small scale. How wrong and at which scale do they become very wrong? We have no idea. What exists on a small scale like this? We have no idea. But this Planck length happens to be very small, so we can confidently say by the Planck length, our laws of physics are worthless. Not at it, probably some point well before it, but definitely by it they are worthless. It’s just the only thing we have at that small of scale to use as a threshold.
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