https://orionscoldfire.com/index.php/2020/02/14/behold-arrokoth-the-jeb-bush-of-the-solar-system/
Good golly Miss Molly! I was reading an article about the highest possible energies that a particle accelerator could accelerate a proton to and the author started throwing around terms like the Planck energy and the Planck distance and pretty soon it was Planck this and Planck that and Planck the other thing. Now I dimly remembered that expressing a physical measurement in terms of its Planck equivalent was a way of normalizing the units so that the fundamental constants like the speed of light; c and the gravitational constant; G were rendered as unity in these measurements and thus the Planck units were the fundamental expressions for these concepts. But I never remembered what sizes these Planck versions came out to.
So, I looked them up in Wikipedia (of course):
| Table 1: Modern values for Planck’s original choice of quantities | |||
| Name | Dimension | Value (SI units) | |
| Planck length | length (L) | 1.616255(18)×10−35 m | |
| Planck mass | mass (M) | 2.176434(24)×10−8 kg | |
| Planck time | time (T) | 5.391247(60)×10−44 s | |
| Planck temperature | temperature (Θ) | 1.416784(16)×1032 K | |
Now the Planck mass is a perfectly ordinary number. 10−8 kg is quite a large number compared to the mass of a proton or a neutron. But look at the Planck time; 10−44 s or Planck temperature; 1032 K. What exactly does 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees K even mean? What would the velocity of the atoms at that temperature be? Would they be traveling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999999 of the speed of light?
So, I shake off this feeling that I’ve entered the silly season and read on. Apparently at these Planck conditions the gravitational force becomes equivalent to the stronger forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear strong force and that allows for “interesting” effects. Reading on into this miasma of confusing ideas I gathered that these Planck units were considered the limits of these measurements. In other words, trying to define a time period less than 10−44 seconds was meaningless in our quantum system. And possibly temperatures above the Planck temperature would just create micro-black holes.
Pretty soon they were talking about how evaporating black holes run into problems with these “trans-Planckian” conditions and pretty soon I was experiencing full blown transphobia. After all, when I had first read about evaporating black holes back before fake news it had sounded kind of bogus to me. Stephen Hawking was one of those characters from the world of science that seems to approach the edges of science fiction. A man with a super genius intellect trapped in an almost completely disabled body who can only move a couple of his fingers and can only communicate with the world via the most painfully slow interface imaginable. If it turns out Hawking is mistaken about evaporating blackholes I’m sure the world will cut him some slack. Other than a few physics PhD’s that might get yanked, I’m pretty sure that the practical damages from evaporating black holes getting blown out of the water will be pretty close to 10−44 dollars.
And speaking of which have we finally found the limits of US federal spending? If Dopey Joe Biden tries to print more than 1 Planck dollars will Washington DC be ripped right out of space time and returned to Cthulhu’s dimension where the Democrats came from? Boy I hope so.
if only we were so lucky
Of course I’m being facetious but as they endlessly inflate our currency we will reach a point where even the dollar will begin to lose its value. I wonder if they think about that. Or will they already be personally divested of dollars at that point?
But then what do they keep their wealth in?
Gold?
Real-estate?
It sure won’t be the Chinese currency and the Euro will crash right along with the dollar as they are spending more than the US is.
Some combination of agricultural land, mineral rights and manufacturing companies. For them it’ll be a waiting game to scoop up all the real assets of the US after they destroy it.
I’ve never quite bought into the “Disappearing Black Hole theory”. Understand that I am nowhere near the towering intellect that was Stephen Hawking, but it doesn’t make sense to me. The theory claims that once a Black Hole has sucked in enough mass, it ceases to exist. OK, what happed to all that mass then? Where is it? Where did it go? Astronomers tell us that the center of the Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole. OK, that black hole should be old enough and sucked in enough mass to disappear. Why hasn’t it? The theory does not… Read more »
I know what you mean. It’s fun to learn about concepts like black holes that are remarkably strange and almost inexplicable. But at least there is remarkable amounts of circumstantial evidence for their existence. But then when someone comes up with something like string theory or evaporating black holes or the multiverse for which not only is there no evidence but for which no evidence is even possible I check out.