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Planck length, mass, time and so on are built from the most fundamental physical constants - the speed of light, the Planck constant and the gravitational const
by danbruc 11y ago
Planck length, mass, time and so on are built from the most fundamental physical constants - the speed of light, the Planck constant and the gravitational constant - all of which are independent of the reference frame. But I don't think that is actually important.
It has more to do with units, i.e. the concrete value of the speed of light is determined by the way we defined the meter and the second and the same holds for the other constants. But that has no physical content, the value 299,792,458 m/s is a historical accident and we could as well have ended up with 42 foo/bar.
So what physicist do is just set those constants to one and get rid of those arbitrary numbers by choosing appropriatei units, e.g. the speed of light becomes one lightyear per year. Because nothing moves faster than the speed you can then also go further and measure velocities with a unitless value as a fraction of the speed of light, i.e. a number between zero and one, as it it appears in the equations of special relativity.
So if you throw those constants together in relatively simple expressions like hG/c³ you again get one as the numerical value and here for example something with units of area, the Planck area. But there is also no real physical content in the Planck units beyond that.
Because the laws of physics usually contain all the constants and values in small powers and with small factor like a Pi here and one half there those units define scales of length, time and so on where the quantities are all about one, nothing is ten to the twenty or minus thirty. So at that scales the laws of physics may show interesting behavior like (1 - v²/c²) becoming zero as v approaches c but that are also more like heuristics than hard truths.
So to make a long story short, Planck units are frame independent because they are built from constants and they are nice to think in because many things are of order one - a black hole of one Planck mass has probably a horizon of one Planck area or four Pi Planck areas or something small like that - but they are not that special.
- qrendel 11y agoBut you seem to be claiming that spacetime is unlikely to be quantized because the Planck length or Planck time, i.e. the quanta of length in spacetime, would be contracted in different reference frames. Therefore Planck units of length/time wouldn't be frame invariant - they'd depend upon your inertial reference frame. So claiming Planck units are frame independent violates the idea that spacetime can't be quantized (at least for the reason you stated), since the quanta would experience relativistic contraction and dilation. The explanation seems to go against your original comment. Edit: I may have given the wrong impression - when I said "Planck units" I meant quanta of space, time, area, etc. Not "natural units" where all relevant physical constants are taken to equal one. It appears the term "Planck units" refers to one of multiple sets of natural units, of which I was not aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units#Planck_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units#Planck_units
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoIt depends if relativistic behaviour is emergent or fundamental. The whole point of the "spacetime is quantised" argument isn't just to suggest that spacetime comes in little lumps, but to investigate the possibility that the properties of spacetime - including curvature, relativistic effects, and all the weirdness in quantum theory - emerge from a common fundamental description. Planck-scale invariance is a red herring - or rather, it's a naive assumption that may not be accurate. There isn't really much useful theory or experimental evidence in Planck-scale physics. For an overview, see http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module6_Planck.htm http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module6_Planck...