Saturday, March 19, 2016

Wavelength of 2^95 Planck lengths = red

Ok, so for my first post since the thing about Rule 110 tiles over a year and a half ago, I will be talking about something interesting (in my opinion) that I discovered. 

First of all, I have always been kinda fascinated by Planck units.  The  way I understand it, Planck units are fundamental amounts of stuff in physics.  For instance, the Planck length is considered to be the smallest unit of length that has meaning in current physics theories.  The Plank time is the corresponding smallest unit of time.  Light, by the way, apparently travels at exactly one Planck unit per Planck time, which is interesting. 

Anyway, I got this idea a while back I decided that the metric system doesn't go far enough in having non-arbitrary units of measure.  Sure it's all "a meter is 100 centimeters, a centimeter is 10 millimeters" but a millimeter is arbitrary.  What about doing things in multiples of 2^n Planck units?   
If I did things related to 2^n Planck units, maybe I would feel more "in tune with the universe" or something silly like that.  Now the Planck units for length and time are very small.  By trial and error and using Wolfram Alpha, I was able to figure out that 2^144 Planck times is about 1.2 seconds.  (I probably could have found an answer more efficiently using logarithms or something but I was feeling lazy.)  I used to give myself two hours to try and get as much done as possible when I had things to get done, but now I try to give myself an extra minute and a half, since 1.5 x 2^155 Planck times is close to 61.5 minutes.  (Or perhaps I should have gone for 2^155.5 Planck times and subtracted a couple minutes instead...)

I also started thinking about plank lengths.  Then I started thinking about wavelengths of light.  What color, I wondered, corresponds to some wavelength integer n of 2^n Planck lengths?  With more trial and error, I figured out that 2^95 Planck lengths corresponds to a wavelength right in the middle of the part of the red labeled region of the visible spectrum!  This seemed kind of interesting, since 2^96 Planck lengths would be twice the wavelength, and in the infrared (invisible to humans) whereas 2^94 would be half the wavelength, and also out of the range of human vision (ultraviolet.) 

I have a feeling that most likely there is no real significance to this, but who knows, maybe there is.  Humans evolved to see wavelengths of light that are available for us to see, which depends on the wavelengths most emitted by our star, which depends on nuclear/quantum physics, which depend on the Planck length and other Planck constants.  I'm sure I'm stretching here, and mostly I just like to think that there's something special about the color red for me now. 

I did some google searches for 640.2 nm and 640.3 nm (wavelengths of visible light are generally given in nanometers, 2^95 Planck lengths ≈ 640.5 nm) and found a few things that at a glance looked possibly interesting, but I also found hits for things at 640.6 nm, etc.  It would be interesting to do some analysis to see if there are more hits for 640.2 and 640.3 than for other wavelengths.  At a glance I didn't see much interesting for 640.25 nm, which is interesting in and of itself that as far as I know I'm the first to say anything interesting about that particular wavelength :-P

As an aside, there's also the Planck mass, which is interesting in and of itself.  This one is different from the Planck mass and Planck length, in that it's a maximum value, not a minimum value.  There is apparently no minimum value for mass.  One way I have heard the Planck length described is that it's the maximum amount of mass (or equivalently energy) that will fit in a Planck length x Planck length x Planck length cube of space.  (At this point it becomes the smallest possible black hole, and only becomes bigger with more mass added!)  The upshot of all this though is that unlike the Planck length and Planck mass which are much much to small to observe in any way, a Planck mass of something could actually be visible to a person.  A Planck mass is about 21.8 micrograms, which, according to Wolfram Alpha, is about 7X the mass of a "typical small grain of sand," for what that's worth. 

More interestingly, and again using Wolfram Alpha, I find that a cube made of a Planck mass of gold wold be a bout a tenth of a millimeter on an edge, and currently be worth about a thousandth of a penny!   A Planck mass of ultralight Silicon Aerogel on the other hand, would according to my calculations be a slightly less easy to lose cube 2.5 millimeters on a side!  You can buy a whole bunch of those here!  (The Planck mass of Aerogel costs a bit more than the gold D-:)  This could be an interesting marketing scheme for selling tiny amounts of stuff to nerds...yay!

1 Comments:

At August 3, 2016 at 5:19 AM , Blogger richardhroth said...

I found your post because in trying to figure out a way to explain log scales for a gardening class I discovered (ok googled) that the universe is a planck lenghth times 10 to the 61st power, and that half that, on that scale is about 10 to the 30.5 which is about the size of single celled organisms, (smallest animal/plant life) hence the size of soil/water microbes. In making this illustrative for students I envisioned a installing markers a yard apart and numbering them from 1 to 61, and then designating where on that scale different lengths fell, like the wavelengths of visible light, the diameter of a radish seed, the height of a corn stalk, distance to the moon, etc. So I find your post and it is in powers of 2 and it does not compute in my poor head. How do I convert that to the powers of 10 scale? And finally, I am now off on contemplating the meaning and logic behind a planck mass, thank you very much. . .

 

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