5.3912×10^−44 seconds.
Plank Time
There are more units of plank time in a single second... than there are seconds that have ever passed since the beginning of time as we understand it. (4.3478x10^17 seconds since the big bang)
*shudder*
Normally? It's a big numbers that give me that shiver, but this?
It's too damn small! It's so small it's creepy.
#physics , #bigNumbers , #time , #plankUnits
@futurebird
weird physics question: imagine a photon with frequency equal to the inverse of the Planck time constant, or about 1.8549e43 hertz
multiply by the Planck constant, 6.62607e-34 , and you have the photon's energy: about 12,290,529,288 joules, or approximately the energy released in the detonation of 2.9 tons of TNT .
this would be a heck of a lot of energy.
How could such a photon be generated? What would happen if it collided with, say, a proton?
@llewelly @futurebird , I'm going to guess that quantum graininess is going to prohibit a photon of that energy level. It is well outside anything we could currently even measure, let alone generate. I may be wrong, and graininess only applies to the lower end of photon energy though.
@ShadSterling @llewelly @futurebird I am trying to point out the measurement issues, which do exist in very small energy photons, and I believe the same could exist in very high energy ones as well. It has been 30 years since my quantum mechanics class, so my language is clunky at best, and also probably misstated.
@JonKramer @llewelly @futurebird I may have misunderstood “granieness”; I’m not aware of anything that would prohibit a photon of that energy, but it is far outside of what we could measure
@ShadSterling @JonKramer @futurebird
Some time later, I'm now thinking this is 2𝜋 times the Planck energy, which I seem to recall is sometimes theorized to be a kind of unapproachable maximum energy. So that might be a limit, but I'm way beyond my limited physics knowledge here.
@JonKramer @llewelly @futurebird photons aren’t known to be quantized, it’s the allowed states of systems that can absorb or emit them that are quantized (e.g. energies of electrons bound to an atom)
But quantization of the high-energy end of blackbody radiation is what resolved the “ultraviolet catastrophe”