Planck's constant is a thing we all hear about in high school physics classes, but no one really talks about why it's cool.

Textbooks will talk dryly about "blah blah theories of quantum gravity" and teachers will repeat that "something something a photon's energy to its frequency. And sure, these things are true. But when people say stuff like that, they're really burying the lede.

Planck's constant is about the limits of what's physically possible in the Universe!

A Planck length is a unit of length which can be derived from Planck's constant. It is the smallest length which is possible in our Universe.

And it's unimaginably tiny. A hundredth of a billionth of a billionth of the size of a proton. But this is significant. Anything smaller than a Planck length cannot exist. It would not make physical sense.

Planck lengths are basically Universe pixels.

A Planck time is the time taken for light to travel one Planck length. As Einstein proved, it's impossible for anything to travel faster than light. That's the upper speed limit for anything travelling through the spacetime fabric of our Universe.

So the Planck time is arguably the smallest unit of time which can possibly exist and still have any meaning.

At the other end of the scale you have the upper limits which are also absurd.

A Planck temperature is 140 thousand billion billion billion degrees. That's the highest possible temperature in our Universe. Nothing hotter can exist.

A Planck density is roughly 100 billion billion times the mass of the Sun squeezed into the size of an atomic nucleus. It is the highest density which can possibly exist. But that one's theoretical. A black hole would form long before anything could get that dense.

Follow

@InvaderXan when I hear "absolute limits" I think "we aren't being creative enough, let's experiment"

Aaand this is why I shouldn't study theoretical physics

@elfi I used to think the same. From what I've seen though, you can be as creative as you like, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Universe will play along.

@InvaderXan I mean it's all fun and games until I restart the universe trying to experiment with the density one

@elfi I was about to type that I'm not sure if that's possible, but I'm not sure this is a challenge I want to accidentally give you 😂

@InvaderXan if you think about it, the big crunch is just the universe unwinding its stack

@elfi Fun fact about the big crunch, if it happens there will be a point near the end of the Universe where everything everywhere will be the temperature of liquid water, so everything will be habitable. I'm going to build a beach house on Pluto.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Pixietown

Small server part of the pixie.town infrastructure. Registration is closed.