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?
A wevelength is the distance between identical points on a wave. So: the distance from peak to peak, or trough to trough. That kinda thing.
(2) How are wavelengths and energy related?
The higher the energy, the shorter the wavelength. For a somewhat intuitive sense of this, you can consider that a single wavelength (peak to peak) carries a constant amount of energy. If the wavelength is shorter, you can fit more waves into the same space, and thus you have a higher energy. This is not *actually* how it works, but hopefully provides a good intuitive feel for it.
(3) Why is the Plancks Length the smallest thing in the universe?
Strictly, the Planck length is not necessarily the shortest length possible. See my below point.
(4) What happens when something is smaller than a Planck Length?
Below the Planck length, our currently-understood laws of physics break down.
All our laws of physics apply to certain “regimes”, certain spans of energy. As we’ve seen above, wavelengths correspond to energies. Above a certain energy, none of our currently-understood laws of physics hold. In the same way that special relativity takes appreciable effect above a certain speed, so “something else” must take effect above this energy cutoff. The value of this energy cutoff corresponds to a length of the Planck length.
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