The Humam egg comparison size with the entire measurable universe to that of a Plank length to a human egg really puts it into the absolutley scale perspective. Nicely done. Mind blow.
@@thorinsee5129 In reality, none of us can even come close to imagining how vast the observable universe is, but we can be stunned that it is a large scale. Even if we’ll never truly grasp its size.
Wait this means that humans, in all our cosmic insignificance, are closer in size to the largest thing (that we could ever observe anyway) than the smallest. Just... woah. From the perspective of a hypothetical Plank-being, a human body would seem even more impossibly vast than entire universe does to us! This is why I love this stuff.
@@seveng0th well we can't know for sure if that's true. Also, it's BECAUSE we are conscious that we even care about things like that In the first place.
Makes me think about cosmic rescaling like Penrose talks about. Just instantaneously everything that was the size of mitochondria is now the size of the moon, and it all starts over.
years ago i was told to add the smallest pencil dot i could manage on to a sheet of paper, then imagine that dot was increased to the size of the observable universe in which someone would be adding a new tiny pencil dot - with that second dot being a good estimation of planck length. The egg cell scenario is very similar but sounds way more scientific.
This is actually how science videos shall be made. You use the things people are familiar with and compare them in size to exmplain how something is small or big. Thanks a lot! Keep up with a good work.
Excellent work, as always. I've never seen the Planck length - egg cell - observable universe comparison before. Simply mind-blowing! Thanks for uploading these superb videos.
@@ghhoward That's right! because any universe smaller than the human egg is not a universe anymore! because that's the smallest that a universe can possibly get! Universe*plank length=human egg.
Thank you very much. I'm sure UA-cam isn't shadow banning me at all. I'm just not very good at self promotion, and my job means I don't get chance to make as many videos as I'd like.
@@LearningCurveScience yeah, we need “sponsors.” Pity that some are good at raising sponsors, but produce mediocre content. Then there are guys like you who produce great content, but raising sponsors “ain’t” your thing
clear ?..for me not really : it s like switching from one illusion to another .. look at the video on yuotube by trying to tag " how is the universe far bigger than you think". then you get how uncomprehensible large is already the observable universe ( not to mention the whole universe) . At this scale it s a fallacy to pretend to scope numbers that big ( like the size of the universe, plank lenght). then trying to explain one with the other is ... another fallacy ?!
@@didierleonard7125 true but it's still better than having no reference. Also plenty of people know that the observable universe is about 30-40 billion light years in radius.
There is an ERROR on the screen at 4:50, where the values and units are given for the fundamental constants as well as the formula to calculate Planck's length using them. Planck's constant's unit is [m^2*kg*s^-1] and *not* as given [m^2*kg^-1*s^-2]. If we tried to calculate the length with these units, we would get something like [m*kg^-1*s^(-1/2)]... If we use the correct unit for Planck's constant, all the units nicely reduce to [m]. I watch a lot of educational videos on math and the universe, not particularly Learning Curve 2b honest, and occasionally produce my own. So we should all be careful about the data and formulas we provide.
Very nice scale explanation at the end there. It really made me understand how tiny the Planck length actually is. What a great example. I will remember this one when trying to explain science to my friends and family.
Thank you very much. Honestly I just enjoy making the videos and the opportunity I get to do some research of some cool science, I'm glad you enjoyed it too.
FINALLY! This got up into the hundreds of thousands of views (& counting). It's taken a while for this channel and its great content to catch on, but I'm glad that many of its videos are finally getting their well deserved views and this channel getting into the many thousands of subscribers now, too. 💁
Not really a coincidence, the universe has such a massive scale it's hard not to be roughly in the center no matter what you are, even cells are closer to the size of the universe than the size of a planck
Very well done. Short and to the point, easy to follow, easy to understand, no deep diving into complex math equations. That said, I'll unwillingly be forgetting most of this stuff after my short term memory of it fades away and I'll be back to describing it "ridiculously super duper uber small". :P
I estimate that the theoretical minimum size that our visual cortex can process is in the vicinity of 1-10 micrometers. Interestingly, this is just above the wavelength of the light we see: red has a wavelength of about 0.9 micrometers.
the proton, neither the neutron nor the electron are all made of three quarks all of them are made of various numbers of quarks, and the number is changing constantly from 15 quarks to 2 quarks
The important thing to understand with all Planck units is the point of them - that when these are used as base units, the universal physical constants, namely the Gravitational constant, Planck's constant, Boltzmann constant and the speed of light in vacuum all compute numerically to 1. So, that if instead of using m, kg and s, we were to use lp as the unit (and so on), our constants would all be numerically equal to 1 (with the correct dimensions, of course). While the scales are cool, they are not meant to be understood by humans. They are only a mathematical convenience. Just wanted to put it out here in the comment section, in order for the idea to be complete.
Trying to wrap my head around it though, thinking of a plank length as the smallest possible distance-before reading this-I was picturing as the point where reductionism of space ends and you only have 0 dimensional points that something can't 'move' across but can only jump from point to point since no smaller distance can be traveled. Would you say that's not the case? Haven't had a chance to learn about the plank length and all the science surrounding, etc. yet, but it seems super interesting so I'm gonna start now hehe.
@@brown3394 Just some more food for thought: it's practically impossible for an entity/object to enter in contact with anything else, on top of that: at that size nothing should move like we expect, so don't visualise it in a static environment, because it's pure chaos down there (although I'm talking with bigger particles in mind, as I can't even imagine how hard it would be to look in the exact spot where something of that dimension exists)
I remember a story about an early physicist; 18-1900s. He stated that a pin dropped on Earth was a measurable quantity on the surface of Sirius. Or vice versa, anyway this happened at a conference of like-minded Science Nut Bags, and apparently they all immediately went hurtling off to their respective labs to sweat out and confirm his maths. I don't know if he used the Plank length to do this, but the analogy was a good one, and it stayed with me.
Planck Length is not necessarily the smallest size in the universe. It's the hypothetical smallest size you can observe without the microscope collapsing into its own black hole. There are some theoretical models that use even smaller objects such as string theory.
Well a microscope can't turn into a black hole! and nothing is smaller than the planck length! and if something was smaller than the planck length that would be so small that it would explode and dissapear out of existance!
The fact that you can Envision the plank length at all really should humble more people than it does. Sometimes we're too smart for our own good and it causes us hubris when we should be humbled by capacity of our own brilliance. It just boggles my mind sometimes that our meat spaceship of seawater is capable of encapsulating the cosmos with inside our own imagination. I'm granting that we stand on the shoulders of giants to be able to conceptualize some of these things but the fact that we can even do it at all is truly fascinating.
So the Planck Length doesn't undergo Lorentz Contraction? That's fascinating-I didn't know that! Obviously the equations of Special Relativity themselves contain no hint of quantum phenomena. The Wikipedia page for "Length contraction" also doesn't mention it. I tried to think about its implications, and immediately ran into intuition-defying contradictions. But that's not unusual whenever SR and/or QM get involved. I'd love to understand more.
Planck length doesn't Contract because it is based on c (which of course is constant). It is one of so few fundamental universal concepts, based on those fundamental formulae. If it wasn't constant then those formulae would be meaningless and the structure of the universe would collapse into quantum foam...
I think his explanation there is a bit confused. You're going to say the Plank length is 1.6E-35 m. The person in the spaceship travelling 0.99c relative to you is going to say the Plank length is 1.6E-35 m. But if you had an object on Planck length long, the person in the spaceship would measure it as being ~2.3E-36m. If you could both measure things that small.
@@lennierofthethirdfaneofchu7286 The whole point of the Planck Length is that you cannot measure anything smaller-not even in theory. Let's take your example-an object that is Planck Length long in a stationary reference frame. Now, in a moving reference frame-as you said-according to Special Relativity, its length should be L' = γL, where γ = √(1-v²/c²). However, since that's smaller than the Planck Length, you'll NOT be able to measure it, no matter how sophisticated your instruments. I don't know what the results of measuring it will be. In any case, it'll either remain Planck lengths long, or its length will appear to have shrunk to zero units. You won't be able to measure anything in between. This means that the equations for Lorentz Contraction fail at Planck Length. New, more comprehensive equations are required. This shouldn't be totally shocking. After all, Special Relativity showed that Galilean Relativity fails at speeds approaching *c.* And now, Quantum Mechanics is telling us that Special Relativity fails at Planck Length.
@@nHans No. The Planck units are an artifact of setting all those fundamental constants to 1. (It takes one Planck time for light in a vacuums to go one Planck length. If the universe is quantized at both the Planck length and Planck time, everything would either move at the speed of light or not at all.)
I've heard it put this way: Think of the size of the observable universe, around 92 billion light years in diameter. Now think of that compared to an atom in terms scale. The Planck length is around the same scale compared to an atom.
0:38 this image is called "cat flower kitten" and I have been aware of it since 5th grade, I used it to make a website to get myself organized. I was using it because I wanted a cute background. It is so crazy that it ended up here.
I liked Brian Cox's explanation: a plank-squared is basically a pixel in the giant display that we call the universe (hugely(lol) paraphrasing here btw)
An egg cell to the universe = a planck length to an egg cell. Much smaller than I expected, but more fascinating is the cell of life is the midpoint of length within all existence
Theoretical limits on our ability to measure nature is a scary thought. Because it means that there are potential interactions that affects us but we'll never be able to detect them. Good Topic, Great video.
Thank you, yes theoretical limits are interesting and a little unsettling. Fortunately at the moment, Planck length is a long way from what we are able to discern.
I'm glad you enjoyed the video. I appreciate every view of every video and really enjoy making them. I've learned so much whilst making these videos. Thank you very much
That's what I'm saying. I come back with some frequency to see... I don't know how some get numbers quick and others get there slowly. Either way, based on some of the similar (other) types of videos and the numbers they get, these will get there. Looking forward to it.
This is the best explanation I have seen on UA-cam! Very clear and easy to understand, much better than other videos with millions of views. Keep up the great work! Subscribed
At 4:51 the value of Planks Contestant (h)is given using the symbol h with a bar across it which is the symbol of the reduced Planks Constant. The reduced Planks Constant is Planks Constant divided by 2π.
I'm wondering whether the units for Planck constant here should be m²•kg•s−¹ (instead of m²•kg-¹•s-² given in the video)? That's what I've seen elsewhere and also units would cancel properly. Great videos by the way, very interesting concepts!
2:02 I’m fascinated by the quality of the thought that science’s best definition of “empty space” is something that some particles appear to just cross easily. It’s like saying that the best definition of swamp is a region where people can just barely cross while other animals cross it without too much difficulty. Bravo!
So... I think I read someplace about cellular space... where was it... anyway, if there is nothing smaller than plank length nothing could travel from one end of the length to the other, because it could not be divided in such a way. Therefore it would have to skip along... I always found this to be interesting.
05:40f You wouldn't _appear_ shorter unless you're already retreating from the other observer. Fun fact: As long as you approach her/him, you would _appear_ even longer, just not to the extent (s)he would expect due to the finite speed of light, assuming (s)he's at rest. So (s)he would _calculate_ your spacecraft _as_ shorter.
Your videos are brilliant explanations of the most interesting aspects of our universe. It's just a shame that you aren't getting the same number of subscribers and likes as the Instagram crowd as you are much better at making people feel utterly insignificant and irrelevant. Cheers for the wisdom.
planck length isnt the “absolute smallest” like most think, it goes infinitely smaller we just cant observe any smaller because of how everything we know breaks down at that scale, so theres no really resolution or pixelation of the universe
Without the plank length there could not be a universe for there would always be an infinite distance between two objects, so the universe requires a limit to how small something can be. Like pixels.
@@LearningCurveScience it's pretty amazing to have the chance to watch your channel before the 'moment' arrives and suddenly thousands will be enjoying these videos every day
Now we are getting somewhere! So 10 to the 33 is the amount of quantum gravity felt by the smallest know particle. Any idea where "dark matter" hides all those parts responsible for reactions outside of gravity?
I know I’m kind of late to this video but what it’s the smallest thing that can ever dream to be able to zoom in and see with the best teoretical microscope?
Ever since I figured out about the planck length I always wonder about how matter cannot be made up of nothing it has to be made of something so by that logic everything is infinitely small
You're correct. _All_ elementary particles of the Standard Model-quarks, neutrinos, electron etc.-are point-sized objects of zero size. Zero radius, zero volume. Literally. What he's talking about is their *_interaction cross-section,_* not their physical size. Of course, he should've mentioned that in order to avoid misinforming his users.
@@nHans Are you able explain this concept of 0 size to me in a way that makes more digestible sense, or is it just a product of the physics that is hard for anyone to make intuitive sense of? That's been something that hasn't ever seemed to make any logical sense to me-or feels like this number 0, and the number 0 as I've always understood it, are two completely different things-if you know what I mean. In other words: 0 is usually used to represent nothing, then you hear that 0 can also represent something, and that in fact the building blocks of the universe and everything we are made up with size and length of is actually build from 'nothing' in size and length-is sort my best way to describe the dilemma. Is everything just waves/particles of effects of the different forces, rather than being objects in physical space as we think of 'things'?
@@brown3394 Don't beat yourself up over it. _Nothing_ in the quantum realm makes intuitive sense to anybody. Not even to an engineer to me-and I have taken several physics courses in engineering college! Now I can do the math and derive results-at least in simple cases. For example, I can solve Schrödinger's Equation for one-electron systems. I can calculate the probability of an electron tunneling through an energy barrier. And yet, I cannot for the life of me grok what that means in the physical world that I live and work in. The fundamental particles and forces in the quantum world are nothing like anything we experience in our macroscopic, everyday world. First of all, in everyday life, we use real numbers to quantify states of matter. But in the quantum world, that's not enough-we have to use complex numbers. There's no physical interpretation for that. From there, it keeps getting progressively weirder: wave-particle duality, non-determinism (probabilistic behavior), uncertainty, entanglement and so on. Zero-sized particles with non-zero mass, charge, and spin is just part of that general madness. They aren't even 'particles' as we usually understand the word-they're 'vibration modes' of 'quantum fields.' That requires more math than I've ever studied. So, like almost everybody else here, I watch the 'creative visualizations' and listen to the simplistic explanations in these videos, and wonder if even the presenters know what they're talking about.
@@nHans oh k, yeah I've spent a good chunk of time digesting most the subjects on quantum mechanics, was just wondering if I was still in the dark when it comes to this specific concept, but that was what I suspected, thanks a lot for the response!
A planck length is the distance in the video timeline you need to reverse from your current position, if you want to skip back just 10 seconds in a regular movie, because you didn't hear the dialogue clearly
Question from an enthused subscriber (and we must up your view count -- it's criminally low given the quality of material)--why is the Planck length impossible to "halve?" Why is this the accepted "cannot get smaller " standard? Why can't it get smaller still? Thx for any info
I would hazard a guess it's because of its relationship with the other universal constants. If the value of any one of them was different, the value of the Planck length would also be different. A bit like how if the permissivity/permeability of free space was different, so would the speed of light be.
@@barthvapour thx…a sort of “dependency impact” on the universe I’m guessing. Saw another educator who indicated it’s possible to get smaller still than the Planck length, but that’s the most small we can measure with physics. Anything smaller would break our math. Words to that effect. Thx for responding
I've heard the Planck length essentially (in our understanding) is the resolution of reality. So pretty dang HD! Makes an 8K TV hang its head in shame :P
Resolution is a bit misleading because it leads to the common misconception that all lengths are integer multiples of the Planck length, which they're not.
Was energy & matter ever smaller than a Planck length? Like the atoms passing through the gold foil is it possible that energy & matter at one time passed through the barrier separating 1 dimension from another just like the atom passing through the gold foil? To the human eye gold foil looks solid but to an atom it looks like an object full of holes that the atom can pass right through, it is possible that the space we exist in can be seen by something small enough as something that it could pass right through? We can only move in 3 directions, up & down, side to side, and back & forth, and any combination of the 3. In order to leave this dimension we would have to be able to move “in” or “out” of the space we exist in, is it possible that if something was small enough it could move in or out of the space that surrounds everything (kind of like a barrier) just like the atom passing through what we see as a solid barrier? It’s just a thought experiment but maybe energy & matter came from another dimension where it was so small that it passed (either in or out) right through spacetime and expanded into the universe once under a much less force of gravity?
@@findystonerush9339 • No, that’s not entirely true. The Planck length is the smallest measurement known to scientists, it’s possible that new measurements could be infinitely smaller. Everything changes with time & technology, it probably won’t be very long (at the speed technology is growing) before something new is discovered and the Planck length is no longer the smallest thing known to scientists.
So there's a hypothetical possibility there could be extraterrestrial life that, 1. Could potentially be traveling so fast around us that to our perspective have shrunk in size, unnoticeable by humans or technology we have? And 2. Could be so small (as to be efficient in temperature and energy) that they're undetectable due to being smaller than we can detect? (To the size of the neutrino or smaller) Just throwing it out there. We still don't know how much we still don't know, but I really appreciate your content and helping us learn what we can know. 👍🏼
didnt think one could actually imagine planck length in any capacity, but that analogy of human egg cell in the center of the observable universe being the same thing as the center most cubic planck in the center of an egg cell blew my mind
If something of the Planck's length was to move at the speed of 0.9c, would it appear to be smaller than the Planck length? In other words, if the Planck's length is the smallest measurable length and the length does indeed contract for inertial observer, which one would "prevail"? Would contract, but we wouldn't be able to measure it? Or the Planck's length behaves differently and there would be no contraction?
Sorry correct me if wrong. At 4:56, isn't it the units of the Planck's constant suppose to be m^2 kg^1 s^-1, since the other SI units of Planck's constant relating the photon energy and it's frequency is J.s. Moreover with the above mentioned Planck's constant units in your video , the final derived unit will not add up to the units of length...thank you
so they just put constants together in different amounts until the units cancelled out and left only a length, and then they called that length the smallest length? i need to understand why that combination of constants makes sense.
I don't get how you are supposed to imagine it as a length. If you were to say it's length is 1, how can that be if the length 0.5 or half of it's length doesn't exist. Are you supposed to thinking of it as a sphere? That's what I always see, but there doesn't seem to be any real way to imagine any shape or direction with a length that can't be thought of in smaller lengths that make up the whole thing. The only way I am able to picture it, that seems to make even a tiny bit of sense to me, is as 0 dimensional non circular 'points' where movement doesn't exist only teleportation from 'point' to 'point', still even the word point doesn't make sense. How could something move from point to point without first going any fraction of the way, moving as a concept doesn't make sense in that way, and would have to be impossible. But then if the entire universe is ultimately made up of many of these small lengths, where the only way to travel any number of them is by teleporting from point to point, then does that mean nothing in the universe or us ever actually 'moves' but instead teleports from 0d point to 0d point? haha just racking my brain here, maybe that's how particles quantum tunnel hehe.
OMG! that's one of the longest comments i ever saw on youtube! but a length is not a sphere it's a line that helps you to measure things! so the plank length is not too hard to imagine!
@@findystonerush9339 the plank length is described as the shortest possible distance, so imagining it as any familiar shape doesn't work. A line is something that has a halfway point; is divisible - the plank length isn't. If you picture the plank length as the radius of the sphere, and the infinite possible directions in 3d space something can move as the points of the surface area of the sphere. Each point would have to be closer together in distance than the actual plank length, but nothing can be closer together than a plank length, is my point-and to try to illustrate why it can't be a line. It's completely nonintuitive.
The Planck length is easy to imagine. It's the distance you need to move shower controls to get from from freezing to scalding
You need new taps....
This is a universal truth!
Now that puts it in terms I can understand. Brilliant!
Relatable
Your water heater is set way too high if that's a thing
The Humam egg comparison size with the entire measurable universe to that of a Plank length to a human egg really puts it into the absolutley scale perspective. Nicely done. Mind blow.
I know it does!
Jup that really puts it to scale. My brain is smoking but yeah i can imagine it now.
@@thorinsee5129 In reality, none of us can even come close to imagining how vast the observable universe is, but we can be stunned that it is a large scale. Even if we’ll never truly grasp its size.
Human egg???
Kinda backs up the simulation theory if you think about it.
Wait this means that humans, in all our cosmic insignificance, are closer in size to the largest thing (that we could ever observe anyway) than the smallest. Just... woah. From the perspective of a hypothetical Plank-being, a human body would seem even more impossibly vast than entire universe does to us! This is why I love this stuff.
We are the only knowing thing which think about how our universe is. We are not insignificant.
@@seveng0th well we can't know for sure if that's true. Also, it's BECAUSE we are conscious that we even care about things like that In the first place.
Not on a linear scale
@@TheEroticDonkey yeah but the higher is lower than the lower is lower
Makes me think about cosmic rescaling like Penrose talks about. Just instantaneously everything that was the size of mitochondria is now the size of the moon, and it all starts over.
years ago i was told to add the smallest pencil dot i could manage on to a sheet of paper, then imagine that dot was increased to the size of the observable universe in which someone would be adding a new tiny pencil dot - with that second dot being a good estimation of planck length. The egg cell scenario is very similar but sounds way more scientific.
Thank you for this, it was a great visualization and definitely helped.
This is actually how science videos shall be made. You use the things people are familiar with and compare them in size to exmplain how something is small or big. Thanks a lot! Keep up with a good work.
Let them eat cake! He touched on some important points, but did not elaborate in order to satisfy lesser minds. Let them follow the Kardashians!
This is not science. I suppose it could be viewed as a very juvenile introduction but it's at a 4th grade level. Have we sank that low?
@@fredjones7705 *sunk
@@alexanderzerka8477 See what I mean?
The Midlands (UK) accent is a key component for the "perfect" science video too ofc
Excellent work, as always. I've never seen the Planck length - egg cell - observable universe comparison before. Simply mind-blowing! Thanks for uploading these superb videos.
George Howard
Great analogy of the human egg cell smallest size visable to the observable universe for Planck scale. :-)
@@ghhoward That's right! because any universe smaller than the human egg is not a universe anymore! because that's the smallest that a universe can possibly get! Universe*plank length=human egg.
@@findystonerush9339 wait what?
Has UA-cam been shadow banning this guy? He’s freakin’ amazing. Love this stuff
Thank you very much. I'm sure UA-cam isn't shadow banning me at all. I'm just not very good at self promotion, and my job means I don't get chance to make as many videos as I'd like.
@@LearningCurveScience yeah, we need “sponsors.” Pity that some are good at raising sponsors, but produce mediocre content. Then there are guys like you who produce great content, but raising sponsors “ain’t” your thing
No. It’s just that most people are idiots and would rather watch kids playing computer games than learn something. 🤦♂️
@@mattsheldon9732 ha ha…couldn’t have said it better
Your assertion of shadow banning requires some proof even as a hypothetical: the algorithm simply doesn’t shadow ban.
That last example of the human egg scale suddenly made it very clear, Amazing!
clear ?..for me not really : it s like switching from one illusion to another .. look at the video on yuotube by trying to tag " how is the universe far bigger than you think". then you get how uncomprehensible large is already the observable universe ( not to mention the whole universe) . At this scale it s a fallacy to pretend to scope numbers that big ( like the size of the universe, plank lenght). then trying to explain one with the other is ... another fallacy ?!
@@didierleonard7125 true but it's still better than having no reference. Also plenty of people know that the observable universe is about 30-40 billion light years in radius.
I love how you saved the best comparison scale for the last. Couldn't have put it any better. Kudos!
Here's another scale: the Planck length - man - is about 100 million observable universes.
That last comparison between the universe, the egg cell, and the Planck length was really illustrative.
There is an ERROR on the screen at 4:50, where the values and units are given for the fundamental constants as well as the formula to calculate Planck's length using them.
Planck's constant's unit is [m^2*kg*s^-1] and *not* as given [m^2*kg^-1*s^-2].
If we tried to calculate the length with these units, we would get something like [m*kg^-1*s^(-1/2)]...
If we use the correct unit for Planck's constant, all the units nicely reduce to [m].
I watch a lot of educational videos on math and the universe, not particularly Learning Curve 2b honest, and occasionally produce my own. So we should all be careful about the data and formulas we provide.
Yes! i did not see that ERROR! :(
@@findystonerush9339 it's ok little buddy 😊
I knew that...
Such a small error🙄
@@tuneboyz5634 Why? LOL.
finally, science videos that are (a) actually fun to watch and (b) don't require a degree in the topic to understand. great job!
Very nice scale explanation at the end there. It really made me understand how tiny the Planck length actually is. What a great example. I will remember this one when trying to explain science to my friends and family.
This video isso amazing. The channel deserves more subscribers and hopefully will grow♡
Thank you very much. Honestly I just enjoy making the videos and the opportunity I get to do some research of some cool science, I'm glad you enjoyed it too.
@@LearningCurveScience I do not only enjoy it - I love it! Keep it up 👍
It's happening, very slowly, but finally both views and subscribers are at least into the thousands now.
FINALLY! This got up into the hundreds of thousands of views (& counting). It's taken a while for this channel and its great content to catch on, but I'm glad that many of its videos are finally getting their well deserved views and this channel getting into the many thousands of subscribers now, too. 💁
Thank you so much for your continued support. Every one of my subscribers is important to me.
Weird coincidence that the human scale is almost exactly in the middle of the largest and smallest scales we can speak of with any meaning.
we are always at the center of something.... However, history has shown us again and again that we are not. That makes you wonder...
Not really a coincidence, the universe has such a massive scale it's hard not to be roughly in the center no matter what you are, even cells are closer to the size of the universe than the size of a planck
Very well done. Short and to the point, easy to follow, easy to understand, no deep diving into complex math equations.
That said, I'll unwillingly be forgetting most of this stuff after my short term memory of it fades away and I'll be back to describing it "ridiculously super duper uber small". :P
you do a really good job of explaining this and in giving weight to how truly small a Planck length is.
I estimate that the theoretical minimum size that our visual cortex can process is in the vicinity of 1-10 micrometers. Interestingly, this is just above the wavelength of the light we see: red has a wavelength of about 0.9 micrometers.
Outstanding video production: well narrated and your explanation is spot-on. You really put size into perspective. Thank you,
the proton, neither the neutron nor the electron are all made of three quarks
all of them are made of various numbers of quarks, and the number is changing constantly
from 15 quarks to 2 quarks
The beauty of the Planck length is that it allows more space for particles ,as yet undiscovered yet, to exist
Their is a growing idea that the black holes is compacted to Planck length, which of course gives an incredible density
Thank you for pointing out that you don't ACTUALLY GET SHORTER when moving faster, you just APPEAR SHORTER to an outside observer!
Yes! if you where at light speed! an observer would see you the size of a planck length!
The important thing to understand with all Planck units is the point of them - that when these are used as base units, the universal physical constants, namely the Gravitational constant, Planck's constant, Boltzmann constant and the speed of light in vacuum all compute numerically to 1. So, that if instead of using m, kg and s, we were to use lp as the unit (and so on), our constants would all be numerically equal to 1 (with the correct dimensions, of course).
While the scales are cool, they are not meant to be understood by humans. They are only a mathematical convenience.
Just wanted to put it out here in the comment section, in order for the idea to be complete.
How did you derive this?
ah shit yeah that makes a lot of sense ty.
Trying to wrap my head around it though, thinking of a plank length as the smallest possible distance-before reading this-I was picturing as the point where reductionism of space ends and you only have 0 dimensional points that something can't 'move' across but can only jump from point to point since no smaller distance can be traveled. Would you say that's not the case?
Haven't had a chance to learn about the plank length and all the science surrounding, etc. yet, but it seems super interesting so I'm gonna start now hehe.
@@brown3394 Just some more food for thought: it's practically impossible for an entity/object to enter in contact with anything else, on top of that: at that size nothing should move like we expect, so don't visualise it in a static environment, because it's pure chaos down there (although I'm talking with bigger particles in mind, as I can't even imagine how hard it would be to look in the exact spot where something of that dimension exists)
@@jekytcktrue, man the science down there is the most curious sh|t ever-and trying to reconcile all that, with being made of that stuff-I love it.
I remember a story about an early physicist; 18-1900s. He stated that a pin dropped on Earth was a measurable quantity on the surface of Sirius. Or vice versa, anyway this happened at a conference of like-minded Science Nut Bags, and apparently they all immediately went hurtling off to their respective labs to sweat out and confirm his maths. I don't know if he used the Plank length to do this, but the analogy was a good one, and it stayed with me.
i like the short simple descriptions! ill check out a few more of your videos for sure!
Planck Length is not necessarily the smallest size in the universe. It's the hypothetical smallest size you can observe without the microscope collapsing into its own black hole. There are some theoretical models that use even smaller objects such as string theory.
Well a microscope can't turn into a black hole! and nothing is smaller than the planck length! and if something was smaller than the planck length that would be so small that it would explode and dissapear out of existance!
The fact that you can Envision the plank length at all really should humble more people than it does. Sometimes we're too smart for our own good and it causes us hubris when we should be humbled by capacity of our own brilliance. It just boggles my mind sometimes that our meat spaceship of seawater is capable of encapsulating the cosmos with inside our own imagination. I'm granting that we stand on the shoulders of giants to be able to conceptualize some of these things but the fact that we can even do it at all is truly fascinating.
I will make a unit of size so small that it will make Planck length very massive by comparing it and I will call it Kutemeter.
That description of how small the plank length is at the end blew my mind. That is freaking smaaaallll.
So the Planck Length doesn't undergo Lorentz Contraction? That's fascinating-I didn't know that! Obviously the equations of Special Relativity themselves contain no hint of quantum phenomena. The Wikipedia page for "Length contraction" also doesn't mention it. I tried to think about its implications, and immediately ran into intuition-defying contradictions. But that's not unusual whenever SR and/or QM get involved. I'd love to understand more.
Planck length doesn't Contract because it is based on c (which of course is constant). It is one of so few fundamental universal concepts, based on those fundamental formulae. If it wasn't constant then those formulae would be meaningless and the structure of the universe would collapse into quantum foam...
I think his explanation there is a bit confused. You're going to say the Plank length is 1.6E-35 m. The person in the spaceship travelling 0.99c relative to you is going to say the Plank length is 1.6E-35 m. But if you had an object on Planck length long, the person in the spaceship would measure it as being ~2.3E-36m. If you could both measure things that small.
@@lennierofthethirdfaneofchu7286 The whole point of the Planck Length is that you cannot measure anything smaller-not even in theory. Let's take your example-an object that is Planck Length long in a stationary reference frame. Now, in a moving reference frame-as you said-according to Special Relativity, its length should be L' = γL, where γ = √(1-v²/c²). However, since that's smaller than the Planck Length, you'll NOT be able to measure it, no matter how sophisticated your instruments. I don't know what the results of measuring it will be. In any case, it'll either remain Planck lengths long, or its length will appear to have shrunk to zero units. You won't be able to measure anything in between.
This means that the equations for Lorentz Contraction fail at Planck Length. New, more comprehensive equations are required. This shouldn't be totally shocking. After all, Special Relativity showed that Galilean Relativity fails at speeds approaching *c.* And now, Quantum Mechanics is telling us that Special Relativity fails at Planck Length.
@@nHans No. The Planck units are an artifact of setting all those fundamental constants to 1. (It takes one Planck time for light in a vacuums to go one Planck length. If the universe is quantized at both the Planck length and Planck time, everything would either move at the speed of light or not at all.)
@@lennierofthethirdfaneofchu7286 Okay.
Freaking great! I can’t believe how small this length is
........and just.....how small is it?!
@@larryslemp9698 The planck length is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000016 metres! and that is how small it is!
Just when I thought I had somewhat of a grasp that last example just made my brain walk out on me. Great vid!
Planck length = the distance I can move before my wife asks where am I going.
"things are starting to get strange here" hehe I see what you did there.
I've heard it put this way:
Think of the size of the observable universe, around 92 billion light years in diameter. Now think of that compared to an atom in terms scale.
The Planck length is around the same scale compared to an atom.
I thought this was gonna be a deep dive into the maths and physics of WHY it is the smallest possible length.
It’s amazing to be able to visualize the relative size of these things. Extremely well done thank you.
0:38 this image is called "cat flower kitten" and I have been aware of it since 5th grade, I used it to make a website to get myself organized. I was using it because I wanted a cute background. It is so crazy that it ended up here.
I liked Brian Cox's explanation: a plank-squared is basically a pixel in the giant display that we call the universe (hugely(lol) paraphrasing here btw)
An egg cell to the universe = a planck length to an egg cell.
Much smaller than I expected, but more fascinating is the cell of life is the midpoint of length within all existence
Theoretical limits on our ability to measure nature is a scary thought. Because it means that there are potential interactions that affects us but we'll never be able to detect them. Good Topic, Great video.
Thank you, yes theoretical limits are interesting and a little unsettling. Fortunately at the moment, Planck length is a long way from what we are able to discern.
Most underrated channel on YT
Man, this one hurt to think about. Especially that last comparison. Excellent video.
Mind blowing and easy to understand. Excellent!
Zi has some serious morning wood. A real plank you could say.
Thus the mystery.
In 4:53 the dimensions do not match. Planck's constant should be in m² kg per second.
we don't see plancks, we see photons. so, technically, photons are the resolution of the universe.
These videos are put together very well.
Thank you very much. I'm glad you think so. I do put a lot of effort into all my videos.
it's a shame the views are so low for such a great video!
I'm glad you enjoyed the video. I appreciate every view of every video and really enjoy making them. I've learned so much whilst making these videos. Thank you very much
That's what I'm saying. I come back with some frequency to see...
I don't know how some get numbers quick and others get there slowly.
Either way, based on some of the similar (other) types of videos and the numbers they get, these will get there.
Looking forward to it.
@@jlwilder8436 ill try posting this on reddit. might get some viewers.
Yah man
Great video! Looking forward to watching more of your work. Thanks.
This is the best explanation I have seen on UA-cam! Very clear and easy to understand, much better than other videos with millions of views. Keep up the great work! Subscribed
Thank you so much. I do try to keep my videos understandable for people who are interested in science. Thank you again, such a lovely comment.
@@LearningCurveScience Quality communication skills too in your videos...your students are really lucky
At 4:51 the value of Planks Contestant (h)is given using the symbol h with a bar across it which is the symbol of the reduced Planks Constant. The reduced Planks Constant is Planks Constant divided by 2π.
Yes, that's my error. Most of them use h bar. I mis-named it, apologies
I'm wondering whether the units for Planck constant here should be m²•kg•s−¹ (instead of m²•kg-¹•s-² given in the video)? That's what I've seen elsewhere and also units would cancel properly. Great videos by the way, very interesting concepts!
The ending part is insane, its the most insane thing I've seen this year.
2:02 I’m fascinated by the quality of the thought that science’s best definition of “empty space” is something that some particles appear to just cross easily. It’s like saying that the best definition of swamp is a region where people can just barely cross while other animals cross it without too much difficulty. Bravo!
Gonna show her this when she says it’s small 😈
The only correct video when I searched "how small we can measure"
Great video
The atom to proton with that marble reference was crazy. Insane we can study such things
So... I think I read someplace about cellular space... where was it... anyway, if there is nothing smaller than plank length nothing could travel from one end of the length to the other, because it could not be divided in such a way. Therefore it would have to skip along... I always found this to be interesting.
EXCELLENT WORK. CONGRATS MATE.😍😍😍
Again, thank you so much for the lovely comment!
05:40f
You wouldn't _appear_ shorter unless you're already retreating from the other observer.
Fun fact: As long as you approach her/him, you would _appear_ even longer, just not to the extent (s)he would expect due to the finite speed of light, assuming (s)he's at rest.
So (s)he would _calculate_ your spacecraft _as_ shorter.
Just found this guy, great stuff, keep tweeking algorithm
Your videos are brilliant explanations of the most interesting aspects of our universe. It's just a shame that you aren't getting the same number of subscribers and likes as the Instagram crowd as you are much better at making people feel utterly insignificant and irrelevant. Cheers for the wisdom.
as a teacher, i think you have a talent of explaining abstract topics
planck length isnt the “absolute smallest” like most think, it goes infinitely smaller we just cant observe any smaller because of how everything we know breaks down at that scale, so theres no really resolution or pixelation of the universe
at 04:38 Hmm.....Isn't ℏ actually the Diracs konstant? ιρ = √(ℏG/C^3) and ℏ = Diracs konstant = h/2π
You're quite correct. h bar is the reduced Planck constant, which is also Dirac's constant. I misnamed it sorry.
Without the plank length there could not be a universe for there would always be an infinite distance between two objects, so the universe requires a limit to how small something can be. Like pixels.
Thank You,
Really enjoy your videos.
It's really fun to learn Science this way. 🤗🤗🤗
Glad you like them!
Still taller than the short friend.
Still not as small as my brain
I hope you will make the same video for the Planck time unit.
WOW, love that comparison, just in auh! 😄
Thank you!
Glad you liked it!
So pleased I've found this channel I primarily watch kurzegagt so pleased Ive another cool comparable channel to learn from
Thank you so much. I don't think I rank anywhere near Kurzgesagt, but it is lovely of you to say so.
@@LearningCurveScience it's pretty amazing to have the chance to watch your channel before the 'moment' arrives and suddenly thousands will be enjoying these videos every day
Now we are getting somewhere!
So 10 to the 33 is the amount of quantum gravity felt by the smallest know particle.
Any idea where "dark matter" hides all those parts responsible for reactions outside of gravity?
What is the practical value of Planck length and Planck time?
Thank you. Now im confident again!
I know I’m kind of late to this video but what it’s the smallest thing that can ever dream to be able to zoom in and see with the best teoretical microscope?
Ever since I figured out about the planck length I always wonder about how matter cannot be made up of nothing it has to be made of something so by that logic everything is infinitely small
A quark has a finite size? See time 3.27. I thought a quark was a point like an electron with radius zero.
You're correct. _All_ elementary particles of the Standard Model-quarks, neutrinos, electron etc.-are point-sized objects of zero size. Zero radius, zero volume. Literally.
What he's talking about is their *_interaction cross-section,_* not their physical size. Of course, he should've mentioned that in order to avoid misinforming his users.
@@nHans Are you able explain this concept of 0 size to me in a way that makes more digestible sense, or is it just a product of the physics that is hard for anyone to make intuitive sense of?
That's been something that hasn't ever seemed to make any logical sense to me-or feels like this number 0, and the number 0 as I've always understood it, are two completely different things-if you know what I mean.
In other words: 0 is usually used to represent nothing, then you hear that 0 can also represent something, and that in fact the building blocks of the universe and everything we are made up with size and length of is actually build from 'nothing' in size and length-is sort my best way to describe the dilemma.
Is everything just waves/particles of effects of the different forces, rather than being objects in physical space as we think of 'things'?
@@brown3394 Don't beat yourself up over it. _Nothing_ in the quantum realm makes intuitive sense to anybody. Not even to an engineer to me-and I have taken several physics courses in engineering college!
Now I can do the math and derive results-at least in simple cases. For example, I can solve Schrödinger's Equation for one-electron systems. I can calculate the probability of an electron tunneling through an energy barrier. And yet, I cannot for the life of me grok what that means in the physical world that I live and work in.
The fundamental particles and forces in the quantum world are nothing like anything we experience in our macroscopic, everyday world. First of all, in everyday life, we use real numbers to quantify states of matter. But in the quantum world, that's not enough-we have to use complex numbers. There's no physical interpretation for that. From there, it keeps getting progressively weirder: wave-particle duality, non-determinism (probabilistic behavior), uncertainty, entanglement and so on. Zero-sized particles with non-zero mass, charge, and spin is just part of that general madness. They aren't even 'particles' as we usually understand the word-they're 'vibration modes' of 'quantum fields.' That requires more math than I've ever studied.
So, like almost everybody else here, I watch the 'creative visualizations' and listen to the simplistic explanations in these videos, and wonder if even the presenters know what they're talking about.
@@nHans oh k, yeah I've spent a good chunk of time digesting most the subjects on quantum mechanics, was just wondering if I was still in the dark when it comes to this specific concept, but that was what I suspected, thanks a lot for the response!
A planck length is the distance in the video timeline you need to reverse from your current position, if you want to skip back just 10 seconds in a regular movie, because you didn't hear the dialogue clearly
Eggcellent vid!!! The scales literally fell into my eyes as opposed to from them - thanks for a great bit of science 👍
Mind blown. Thank you!!! I'm going to go lay down, now.
Question from an enthused subscriber (and we must up your view count -- it's criminally low given the quality of material)--why is the Planck length impossible to "halve?" Why is this the accepted "cannot get smaller " standard? Why can't it get smaller still? Thx for any info
I would hazard a guess it's because of its relationship with the other universal constants. If the value of any one of them was different, the value of the Planck length would also be different. A bit like how if the permissivity/permeability of free space was different, so would the speed of light be.
@@barthvapour thx…a sort of “dependency impact” on the universe I’m guessing. Saw another educator who indicated it’s possible to get smaller still than the Planck length, but that’s the most small we can measure with physics. Anything smaller would break our math. Words to that effect. Thx for responding
I've heard the Planck length essentially (in our understanding) is the resolution of reality. So pretty dang HD! Makes an 8K TV hang its head in shame :P
Resolution is a bit misleading because it leads to the common misconception that all lengths are integer multiples of the Planck length, which they're not.
Was energy & matter ever smaller than a Planck length?
Like the atoms passing through the gold foil is it possible that energy & matter at one time passed through the barrier separating 1 dimension from another just like the atom passing through the gold foil?
To the human eye gold foil looks solid but to an atom it looks like an object full of holes that the atom can pass right through, it is possible that the space we exist in can be seen by something small enough as something that it could pass right through?
We can only move in 3 directions, up & down, side to side, and back & forth, and any combination of the 3.
In order to leave this dimension we would have to be able to move “in” or “out” of the space we exist in, is it possible that if something was small enough it could move in or out of the space that surrounds everything (kind of like a barrier) just like the atom passing through what we see as a solid barrier?
It’s just a thought experiment but maybe energy & matter came from another dimension where it was so small that it passed (either in or out) right through spacetime and expanded into the universe once under a much less force of gravity?
Well it can't be smaller! because the planck length is the smallest thing possible!
@@findystonerush9339 • No, that’s not entirely true. The Planck length is the smallest measurement known to scientists, it’s possible that new measurements could be infinitely smaller. Everything changes with time & technology, it probably won’t be very long (at the speed technology is growing) before something new is discovered and the Planck length is no longer the smallest thing known to scientists.
As the universe is expanding, does the plank length also expands ? of not, so extra 'pixels' of space are created (???) from what / how (???)
4:50 , The Units Of the plank's Constant are wrong its kg m^2 s^-1
So there's a hypothetical possibility there could be extraterrestrial life that, 1. Could potentially be traveling so fast around us that to our perspective have shrunk in size, unnoticeable by humans or technology we have? And 2. Could be so small (as to be efficient in temperature and energy) that they're undetectable due to being smaller than we can detect? (To the size of the neutrino or smaller)
Just throwing it out there. We still don't know how much we still don't know, but I really appreciate your content and helping us learn what we can know. 👍🏼
didnt think one could actually imagine planck length in any capacity, but that analogy of human egg cell in the center of the observable universe being the same thing as the center most cubic planck in the center of an egg cell blew my mind
Thanks for putting that into perspective.
Are we sure this length result isn’t a rounding error with the other constants being used?
If something of the Planck's length was to move at the speed of 0.9c, would it appear to be smaller than the Planck length?
In other words, if the Planck's length is the smallest measurable length and the length does indeed contract for inertial observer, which one would "prevail"? Would contract, but we wouldn't be able to measure it? Or the Planck's length behaves differently and there would be no contraction?
Sorry correct me if wrong. At 4:56, isn't it the units of the Planck's constant suppose to be m^2 kg^1 s^-1, since the other SI units of Planck's constant relating the photon energy and it's frequency is J.s.
Moreover with the above mentioned Planck's constant units in your video , the final derived unit will not add up to the units of length...thank you
so why is what you get by playing with fundamental constants (so as to get a length) the same as the shortest length?
so they just put constants together in different amounts until the units cancelled out and left only a length, and then they called that length the smallest length? i need to understand why that combination of constants makes sense.
Very interesting. Thank you.
I don't get how you are supposed to imagine it as a length. If you were to say it's length is 1, how can that be if the length 0.5 or half of it's length doesn't exist. Are you supposed to thinking of it as a sphere? That's what I always see, but there doesn't seem to be any real way to imagine any shape or direction with a length that can't be thought of in smaller lengths that make up the whole thing. The only way I am able to picture it, that seems to make even a tiny bit of sense to me, is as 0 dimensional non circular 'points' where movement doesn't exist only teleportation from 'point' to 'point', still even the word point doesn't make sense.
How could something move from point to point without first going any fraction of the way, moving as a concept doesn't make sense in that way, and would have to be impossible. But then if the entire universe is ultimately made up of many of these small lengths, where the only way to travel any number of them is by teleporting from point to point, then does that mean nothing in the universe or us ever actually 'moves' but instead teleports from 0d point to 0d point? haha just racking my brain here, maybe that's how particles quantum tunnel hehe.
OMG! that's one of the longest comments i ever saw on youtube! but a length is not a sphere it's a line that helps you to measure things! so the plank length is not too hard to imagine!
@@findystonerush9339 the plank length is described as the shortest possible distance, so imagining it as any familiar shape doesn't work. A line is something that has a halfway point; is divisible - the plank length isn't.
If you picture the plank length as the radius of the sphere, and the infinite possible directions in 3d space something can move as the points of the surface area of the sphere. Each point would have to be closer together in distance than the actual plank length, but nothing can be closer together than a plank length, is my point-and to try to illustrate why it can't be a line. It's completely nonintuitive.
The close button of an ad is the smallest thing in the universe.
Then as I understand it, Planck time is how long it takes light to travel the Planck length? Would love to see one, using the light travelled analogy.