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) What is a wavelength actually?
I’ll tackle this one.
First, think of a guitar string. When you pluck that string, it starts to vibrate back and forth. Now, imagine a point on the string somewhere down the middle. Picture that point going back and forth as the string vibrates. Now, let’s get out a piece of paper and draw two axes on it: the horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is distance. Let’s graph the dot’s position over time. It goes from one side to the other and then back, oscillating up and down and up and down. If you look at that line, you’ll see peaks and valleys, sort of like a wave! The wave “length” is the distance from one peak to the next.
Guitar strings are not the only thing that vibrates; on the atomic level, literally everything in the universe vibrates as well! Quantum mechanics is the science that deals with these waves and that describes particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons by their wave functions.
Does that help a little?
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