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
>Why is the Planck Length the “smallest thing in the world?” Or at least I hope I asked it right.
It’s not. At least, no one is saying that we know it is. Rather, it’s the smallest length that we can *measure* (sort of). The short version is that quantum theory says to measure a length of distance precisely, one needs to put a lot of energy into a small space. As the distance gets smaller, then the energy requirements get bigger. Eventually, one puts so much energy into the space that it would become a black hole according to the rules of general relativity, and that happens at the Planck length. However, no one really thinks for sure that this would happen, but it is past the point at which our known rules of physics break down. It’s more like “we have no idea how the rules of physics work beyond that length of distance”.
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