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ocelot08 t1_j1w5qks wrote

Quick thought experiment.

If the all the rulers in the world were gone, how would we know how long 1cm is?

Now honestly in our day to day lives, we could probably estimate it and each person might have a slightly different measurement off by a mm or two, but not a big deal.

But if you need to be really exact, like for engineering, you all need to agree on what exactly is that length down to the nano-meter or whatever.

Same with color. RGB is like everyone estimating colors and it may be a little (or a lot) off from one monitor to the next. But Pantone makes and licences out THE rulers for color, makes sure they all match, etc.

Sure, someone else could make their own "rulers for color" standard (with blackjack and hookers), but then you need a huge mass of people to all agree to change over to the new standard for it to be useful.

For most people in their day to day, hex codes and rgb (or equivalent cmyks) are just fine. But pantone is extra granular to make sure you are all using the SAME reference.

Edit: Also, I find this really interesting. There's an object that was for a long time used as THE ideal 1kg. [The International Prototype of the Kilogram] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the_Kilogram).

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ErmahgerdPerngwens t1_j1wgv7h wrote

I love this as a ELI5 answer, it does such a great job against the more technical answers (including the Futurama reference).

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long-gone333 t1_j1wc6x9 wrote

ELI5: blackjack and hookers

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ocelot08 t1_j1wi18q wrote

I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF

Flexo, give me strength

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DrunkenOnzo t1_j1wgmtd wrote

A bit different for distances. With distances there is a universal smallest possible distance that all other standards can be derived from. In this case 6.25 × 10^32 planck lengths = 1cm.

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Giants_Orbiting t1_j1y7kf6 wrote

eli5, how could there possibly be a smallest possible distance? why couldn't you have half a planck?

(i've heard about this planck length before, not in any way trying to say you're wrong, it just seems so unintuitive to me that *distance* could be finitely divisible.)

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DrunkenOnzo t1_j1zc26t wrote

I’m not sure that exists? Maybe someone smarter than me can help out here; I almost failed QED in grad school LOL. But iirc we’d need a better understanding of quantum gravity. As my old professor would say “shit gets real weird at that scale”

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Giants_Orbiting t1_j20avqs wrote

ah, I just misunderstood "universal smallest possible distance"

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DrunkenOnzo t1_j20pjrq wrote

It's the smallest possible length at which length can be defined. I brought it up originally because it's a length derived from universal constants; so even if we met aliens who have no understanding of how we measure, or do math, we will be able to translate our distances and their distances using planck-lengths. 1 miles = ______ planck lengths. 1 Blorb = ______ Plancklengths, so you can convert blorbs to miles without ever taking out a tape measure.

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