New Year’s: Appreciating ‘Finer Things,’ Like Planck Lengths

Happy New Year! 

With 2025 upon us, many poor sots are still recovering from their debauched New Year’s Eve celebrations to come to terms with their rosy “resolutions” for the year ahead. 

Well, good news. For those of you who pledged to “appreciate the finer things in life,” or “life’s little moments,” or whatever such drivel, here’s a bit of rumination on what’s truly “fine” – in the sense of “tiny” – in our universe. 

And, if you appreciate these “finer things,” you can strike one resolution off your 2025 list.  

So, how “fine” can things be?

The Planck Length

The crazy thing is there’s an absolute limit to how “small” or “fine” things can get in the universe. 

Conceptually, of course, one can always imagine dividing a thing in half ad infinitum. But, in the physical universe, there’s an absolute speed-limit – the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second – that cannot be breached. Try to appreciate how fast this speed limit actually is. “A traveler, moving at the speed of light, would circumnavigate the equator approximately 7.5 times in one second,” according to NASA. At 93 million miles from Earth, the Sun's light takes only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to warm us here on Earth.

So, this crazy-high maximum speed also affects how small something can get, if you define a “thing” as something separated by measurable “space” between it and the next closest thing. And it turns out that the pulsation of a single “quanta” or “photon” of light over the shortest distance in its wave function is as absolutely small as can be measured. Anything further is conceptually possible but beyond the capacity of scientific observation.

And the smallest distance between two things has been named the Planck Length, after Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Max Planck (1858-1924), founder of quantum theory. 

So, how small is the smallest you can get? 

A centimeter is about the width of a pencil. And the Planck Length measures only a whopping 10^-33 centimeters. In quantum physics it is referred to as the “quantum of length, or the smallest measurement of length with any meaning,” according to Physlink.com. That’s “a billion billion times smaller than an atom,” according to Scales of the Universe.

In Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, Nobel Prize physicist Frank Wilczek provides a sense of how “fine” or “small” the Planck Length is. “When we refine our focus below about 10^-33 centimeters – a tiny distance known as the Planck Length – then typical fluctuations in the distance between two points can be as large or larger than the distance itself.” So, a Plank length is 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 centimeters, the smallest measurable distance. The Plank Length is ‘thousands of trillions of times smaller than distances we know how to resolve.” 

Notice he said “thousands of trillions of times smaller.”

Planck Time

So, how fast does light move across a single Planck Length? This unit is known as “Planck Time” and is approximately 5.391247 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. Or, if you will, 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds – about the span of a normal person’s attention span these days. 

“Imagine the ratio of the size of the universe compared to a speck of dust,” Fermilab writes. “That’s about how big the speck of dust is compared to the Planck length, 10^-33 centimeters. The Planck time is how long it takes light to travel that distance.”

“Let’s consider the unit of Planck length for a moment,” Symmetry Magazine suggests. A “proton is about 100 million trillion times larger than the Planck length.” 

To try to picture this further, an engineering friend who deals in super-precise measurements told me that in the Olympics, swimmers' times in a regulation pool cannot be usefully measured more minutely than to the 100th of a second, because at 1000th of a second or shorter, the unevenness of the pool's painted surface and its molecular differentiation would unfairly disadvantage swimmers in "longer" lanes. Now, imagine how much smaller 10^-33 centimeters of Planck Length is to that paint layer magnified only 10³  times, giving that swimmer such an unfair advantage.

“Quarks and leptons, the building blocks of matter, are staggeringly small — less than an attometer (a billionth of a billionth of a meter) in diameter. But zoom in closer — a billion times more — past zeptometers and yoctometers, to where the units run out of names,” Wired writes. “Then keep going, a hundred million times smaller still, and you finally hit bottom: This is the Planck length, the smallest possible unit in the universe. Beyond this point, physicists say, the very notion of distance becomes meaningless.”

So, does this mean it is “meaningless” to contemplate the very “finest things in life”?

Not really. Despite the accelerating expansion of the universe over the last 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, it turns out humans are not so infinitesimally small in the vast scalar scheme of things.

In fact, we are approximately at the center of the scale between a Planck Length and the outer edges of the visible universe where matter/energy from the original Big Bang can be glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

“The size of a human being is at the center of all the possible sizes in the universe,” write Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams in their article “The Cosmic Uroboros” in the Missouri Review. “This amazing assertion challenges not only the centuries-old philosophical assumption that humans are insignificantly small compared to the vastness of the universe but also the logical assumption that there is no such thing as a central size. Both assumptions are false, but we have to reconsider the key words of the assertion — center, possible, size, and universe — to reveal the prejudices built into them that constrict and distort our picture of reality. In the modern universe there is a largest and a smallest size, and therefore a middle size.”

So, for this New Year, let’s at least appreciate that we’re right in that perfect Goldilocks zone. 

Now, on to my Resolution #2, where we try to run or walk at least one Planck Length per day…

By Christopher Jones