Submitted by NulloK t3_10c47tv in askscience
Comments
[deleted] t1_j4gihh7 wrote
Really?? I had no idea, I thought Planck time and length were kind of the "resolution" of the universe. Can you point to more reading about this?
r2k-in-the-vortex t1_j4gvc8a wrote
Yeah, but it's more like analog resolution, not the digital resolution everyone is so familiar with. It's like film photography, there is no digital resolution as such, yet some photos are fuzzy and some are sharp. There is a resolution of sorts, a perfect pinpoint light source doesn't ever resolve into perfect pinpoint white dot in the image plane, it's always a circle. Smaller that circle, the higher the analog resolution of the system. Planck's units are a similar sort of "resolution", there is no discrete line between one pixel and the next, but there is a minimum measurable quantity.
wakka55 t1_j4hivxi wrote
Just to add clarity to "analog resolution" - film, optics, and analog signal resolution is generally measured similar to pixel pitch.
You take a card with two black squares with a white square between, and a card with just a grey rectangle, then see how far away you can tell the cards apart, on your photograph, thru the optics eyepiece, or on the oscilloscope. In other words, what angle does 2 dots look like 1 dot. Then how many of said angles fit on a rectangle - there's your megapixels equivilent.
The cards look something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIA_1956_resolution_chart
It's kind of funny that some people don't realize that a lot of 1960s photos and movies are higher resolution than 4k movies are today. Good IMAX and 35mm film was very high res.
[deleted] t1_j4ir06f wrote
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mjbat7 t1_j4f7tzc wrote
Can you explain why? And how much smaller?
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RobusEtCeleritas t1_j4l2on6 wrote
Time is not discrete, as far as we know.
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lemoinem t1_j4euohu wrote
This is not what the Planck scale is.
It's simply the scale at which our current models don't yield meaningful values anymore and we'd need Full Quantum Gravity to provide an accurate description of these kinds of interactions...
LibertarianAtheist_ t1_j506b55 wrote
What did they write?
lemoinem t1_j5077s0 wrote
Common misconception that the Planck length is somehow the smallest length that can possibly exist. That Planck units are actually hard units that can be used to make reality discrete. It is not.
cfgbcfgb t1_j4esulu wrote
No this is just wrong. It is not known if time is discrete but if it is then the units are much smaller than a Planck time. A Planck time is the scale at which quantum events happen, and a discrete unit would have to be much smaller than that