this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
173 points (95.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35728 readers
993 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

isn’t the most recent explanation on planck’s length saying that we simply can’t observe further down

No. The math has the indivisibility built right into it, and our countless observations agree. There's no smaller length, because then the probability distributions between different particles start overlapping. There's a limit to how closely you can zoom in, and we can describe that limit mathematically. We don't know why it's there, but it's certainly there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

can you post a source for this?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can't post a source for all of QM, no. I can share my class notes with you, but you might as well look into it. There are lots of quality online classes about it. You can go digging for info about Planck's constant, that's where it's "built into" the math.

Here's a good explanation from PBS Spacetime https://youtu.be/tQSbms5MDvY

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but he’s not saying that the Planck’s length is the pixel size of our universe.

There is a misconception that the universe is fundamentally divided into Planck-sized pixels, that nothing can be smaller than the Planck length, that things move through space by progressing one Planck length every Planck time. Judging by the ultimate source, a cursory search of reddit questions, the misconception is fairly common. There is nothing in established physics that says this is the case, nothing in general relativity or quantum mechanics pointing to it. I have an idea as to where the misconception might arise, that I can’t really back up but I will state anyway. I think that when people learn that the energy states of electrons in an atom are quantized, and that Planck’s constant is involved, a leap is made towards the pixel fallacy. I remember in my early teens reading about the Planck time in National Geographic, and hearing about Planck’s constant in highschool physics or chemistry, and thinking they were the same. As I mentioned earlier, just because units are “natural” it doesn’t mean they are “fundamental,” due to the choice of constants used to define the units. The simplest reason that Planck-pixels don’t make up the universe is special relativity and the idea that all inertial reference frames are equally valid. If there is a rest frame in which the matrix of these Planck-pixels is isotropic, in other frames they would be length contracted in one direction, and moving diagonally with respect to his matrix might impart angle-dependence on how you experience the universe. If an electromagnetic wave with the wavelength of one Planck length were propagating through space, its wavelength could be made even smaller by transforming to a reference frame in which the wavelength is even smaller, so the idea of rest-frame equivalence and a minimal length are inconsistent with one-another.

Reference: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/hand-wavy-discussion-planck-length/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

but he’s not saying that the Planck’s length is the pixel size of our universe.

And neither was I. But what he IS saying is that there's a limit to how closely you can measure length in any dimension. Thinking of it like pixels is a useful metaphor because that's an indivisible unit, and it's what's behind Planck's constant. But a Planck length is really only relative to quantum gravity, not QM generally.