The other day I was lounging around thinking about all sorts of things, in particular geeky physics things. I have always loved physics, except for the quantum mechanics, which I have always had problem understanding fully.
Recently, however, I realized that quantum and one of its (if not ‘the’) founders, the German scientist, Max Planck, defined a parameter so tiny we cannot even imagine it. Furthermore, this tiny parameter seems to play an important role in our physical systems, including Einstein’s Relativity and all the physics that I love.
So to make a long story short, Mr. Planck decided to devise a system of measurement that would not be ‘Earth-centric’ and be literally ‘universal’ for all creatures, and civilizations, including animals and extra-terrestrials.
Now for some reason he picked a tiny fraction of the diameter of a proton as the Planck Length, and by integrating the speed of light, the Planck Time became the length of time that takes the light to travel the Planck distance.
So how much is this Planck Time? A whopping 5x10-44 seconds! A real small amount of time, eh? Our most validated theory of the universe claims that after this amount of time after the Big Bang, the Gravity force came to itself, whereas the other three forces (strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetic force) were indistinguishable from each other until around 10-36 seconds after Big Bang. The poor gravity had to deal with a triple force for a whole billionth of a second. By the way, according to science, we will never be able to truly discover/observe what happened before our 10-36 second. What a shame.
I guess the next time someone asks me to do something for them, and I want to signal that I will do it quickly, I would just say: «sure I’ll get it done in a Planck’s time». It sounds weird and certainly very geeky, but who knows, maybe they will ask «how long is that?».
Paris, January 22, 2024,
Zeejay