Why Physics Breaks at the Planck Scale

Tonight we travel gently all the way down to the smallest length in the universe, a size known as the Planck length, and ask a quiet question that has occupied physicists for over a century. Why does the world seem to have a smallest size written into it, a length no one ever measured but instead assembled out of three constants of nature. Settle in, lower the lights, and let us walk slowly toward the place where the very idea of distance begins to lose its meaning. There is nothing to solve here, only something true and beautiful to fall asleep inside. Chapters: 00:00:00 A length you cannot halve 00:02:30 Where you are listening from 00:17:09 Planck's accidental ruler 00:34:33 The three pillars meet 00:42:35 When gravity learns to tremble 00:52:00 The energy in a grain 00:58:45 Two theories that will not speak 01:07:13 The measurement that cannot be made 01:14:38 Foam, loops, and strings 01:27:12 Space as something that happens 01:42:56 What the boundary is telling us 01:49:06 The long patient search 01:54:51 The ruler and the dark SOURCES & FURTHER READING Max Planck, On irreversible radiation processes (Über irreversible Strahlungsvorgänge), 1899, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Max Planck, On the theory of the energy distribution law of the normal spectrum, 1900, Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft. CODATA / NIST, Fundamental Physical Constants, current recommended values, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Committee on Data for Science and Technology. Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, W. H. Freeman. Robert Wald, General Relativity, 1984, University of Chicago Press. John Wheeler, Geons, 1955, Physical Review; and related work in Relativity, Groups and Topology, 1964. Werner Heisenberg, On the perceptual content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics, 1927, Zeitschrift für Physik. Ole Rømer, demonstration of the finite speed of light from the timing of Jupiter's moon Io, 1676, reported through the Paris Academy and the Journal des sçavans. Henry Cavendish, Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth, 1798, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687. Albert Einstein, The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity, 1916, Annalen der Physik. Frank Dyson, Arthur Eddington, and Charles Davidson, report on the 1919 eclipse expedition confirming light deflection, 1920, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B. P. Abbott and colleagues, LIGO and Virgo Collaborations, Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger, Physical Review Letters. Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1985, Princeton University Press; and Michael Peskin and Daniel Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, 1995. Jacob Bekenstein, Black Holes and Entropy, 1973, Physical Review D; and Stephen Hawking, Particle Creation by Black Holes, 1975, Communications in Mathematical Physics. Gerard 't Hooft, Dimensional Reduction in Quantum Gravity, 1993; and Leonard Susskind, The World as a Hologram, 1995, Journal of Mathematical Physics. Carlo Rovelli, Quantum Gravity, 2004, Cambridge University Press; and foundational loop quantum gravity papers by Rovelli and Lee Smolin. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, 1999, W. W. Norton; and Joseph Polchinski, String Theory, 1998, Cambridge University Press. Mark Van Raamsdonk, Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement, 2010, General Relativity and Gravitation; and Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind, Cool horizons for entangled black holes, 2013. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, 1715 to 1716. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Quantum-Spacetime Phenomenology, Living Reviews in Relativity. All claims in this video are drawn from established, peer-reviewed, or primary scientific sources. The soundtrack of Cylinder Five by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/cylinders/ Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/