• treesquid@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The Planck length is the shortest measurable length, not the shortest possible length. We have no idea how we’d even go about measuring anything smaller, because we don’t understand physics smaller than that. There could be stuff that’s smaller, like even more elementary particles that build everything and determine the rules of the physics and particles that we do understand. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s the smallest anything can be and there isn’t further sub-Planck physics, or maybe it’s just turtles all the way down.

    • Aniki@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      uhm, so, this is just my uneducated ass talking, but i’m pretty sure that there’s no particles that make up ordinary matter below the planck length

      and i’m saying this because as you split stuff up, you kinda expect the mass of the constituent elements be smaller than the mass of the total. so if you have smaller mass, you have larger uncertainty. and i think when we talk about the “diameter” of subatomic particles, what we really mean, is the uncertainty of its wave function. and that ironically gets larger when you look at smaller particles.

  • troglodytis@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Dude set out to show it was all bullshit and figured out one of the most important pieces of the pie. Mission failed successfully

  • Aniki@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    is there any proof of it being the smallest length? i see that thrown around a lot but no proof for it. why wouldn’t there be smaller lengths?

    • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s the smallest length that our current understanding of the universe will allow. Any distance smaller is immeasurable to us. To measure small things you need to be able to hit them with a photon and get a signal back; and the smaller you want to measure the higher energy that photon has to be. The planck length is the distance where the photon you are using to measure has so much energy comparable to the size that the energy density instantly creates a black hole, that swallows whatever you are trying to observe. Thus it is impossible for us to measure smaller than that distance. Things might absolutely exist at scales smaller than that, but the universe seems to lock them away from us.