indefinite chopping up of physical quantities

[hardyivan007]

Planck says that time and other measurements cannot be chopped up indefinitely. he stated that light would take 10^-43 secs to travel 10^-35 of a metre, and that is the smallest value physical quantities can be broken down into. what evidence is there to support this? coz i really dun like his theory. i think that time and other measurements can be chopped up indefinitely but its just that we do not have the ability to measure them yet.

[Omni]

i think that time and other measurements can be chopped up indefinitely

This is true ofcourse.

[Guille]

just one thing:

if time and space can be reduced or "cut" indefinatelly that means that they can be "cut" infinatelly. And you can't measure infinites-sorry.

[Omni]

Let's say you have 1 sec then you have 0,5 sec also and 0,25 and 0,10 or whatever small number you care to use. Suppose you have 1 meter then you also have 0,5 meter etc. Don't see the problem with that.

[subversion]

I would be interested in this too. Can anybody tell us how Mr. Planck decided that you could only chop things so small?

[Guille]

I would be interested in this too. Can anybody tell us how Mr. Planck decided that you could only chop things so small?

I also want to know this. I can't give a scientific explenation of how he managed it, but I can say he did it with a lot of time, dedication, effort, and most specially.........thinking (icluding all thinking branches).

[AntonioLao]

History

Contrary to popular opinion Planck did not quantize light. This is plain in his writing in his original 1901 paper and in the references in this paper to his earlier work. It is also plainly explained in his book "Theory of Heat Radiation" where he explains that his constant refers to Hertzian oscillators. The idea of quantization was developed by others into what we now know as quantum mechanics. The next step along this road was made by Albert Einstein, who, by studying the photoelectric effect proposed a model and equation whereby light was not only emitted but also absorbed in packets or photons. Then, in 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose developed the theory of the statistical mechanics of photons, which allowed a theoretical derivation of Planck's law.

Nor did Planck derive his law in an attempt to resolve the "Ultraviolet catastrophe", the name given to the paradoxical result that the total energy in the cavity tends to infinity when the equipartition theorem of classical statistical mechanics is applied to black body radiation. Planck did not consider the equipartion theorem to be universally valid, so he never noticed any sort of "catastrophe" - it was only discovered some five years later by Einstein, Lord Rayleigh, and Sir James Jeans.

From the Planck's law of black body radiation we can obtain the Stefan-Boltzmann law by integrating the energy density over all wavelengths.