Comment on Fictional
tetris11@feddit.uk 3 days agois the plank length tied to the speed of events or is it just the shortest distance light can move
Comment on Fictional
tetris11@feddit.uk 3 days agois the plank length tied to the speed of events or is it just the shortest distance light can move
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Its more related to limits of knowability of events beyond a certain scale. Its easy an intuitive to think of it like pixels on a grid with a minimum requirement of time and energy to move between them units but its not that simple or at least that kind of granular discreteness is not proven (though there are digital physics frameworks that treat spacetime discrete like this)
The Planck length does not define the minimum distance something can move but rather the minimum scale of meaningful measurement that can make a bit of distinction between two microsstates of information.
Its a precision limit that defines how exact we can measure interactions that happen within the distance between two points.
It’s possible that spacetime is continuous at a fundamental level, but the Planck length represents the scale at which quantum fluctuations of spacetime itself become so violent that the concepts of a ‘path’ or a ‘distance’ can no longer be defined in the classical sense, effectively creating discrete quantized limits for measurement precision.
Ultimately this precision bound limit is related to energy cost to actualize a measurement from a superposition and the exponetial increase in energy needed to overcome uncertainty principle at smaller and smaller scales. The energy required to actualize a meaningful state from a sub-planck length would be enough to create a kugelblitz black hole made from pure condensed energy.
tetris11@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Thanks for this, I had no idea it was more a precision limitation