The Mind of A Physics Nut

What a weird and wonderful world we live in 

[bioluminescent-crabs]

Fun Science fact #1

In physics, we like refer to sizes on a logarithmic scale. A house is about ten times larger than car, which is about ten times larger than a dog. We then say that logarithmicly the size of a car is half way between that of a house and a dog.

But what if we scaled the interval to between the largest thing, the diameter of the observable universe (about 10^27 meters), and the smallest thing, the Planck Length (about 10^-35 meters)? The object in the middle would be about 10^-4 meters, about 0.1 millimeters.

Funnily enough, that’s the length of the human brain cell. Which is quite humble to think of.

Bluebulbproject.com tells me its also about 1/17 the thickness of spaghetti. Which is also quite humble.

[bioluminescent-crabs]

The Planck Length

It’s a misconception that that the Planck Length (about 1.6x10-35 meters, which 0.0...016 with 34 zeros between the decimal and the “1″) is the smallest distance possible in our universe. Distance could be quantitative (finite multiples of the Planck Length) or continuous (any length), however we might never know as it is impossible to see smaller distances past the Planck Length.

On the human scale, we use instruments like magnifying glasses and microscopes to observe smaller objects. When we reach the much smaller scales like atoms and particles, we need to use lasers that fire out high energy photons; the higher the energy, the smaller space we can observe. However, once we get down to the Planck Length, the photons from the laser have so much energy that it condenses into a black hole with the diameter of the Planck Length. Trying to observe anything smaller means needing to produce higher energy photons which would create larger black holes.