The Highest Resolution Possible

When I was a kid, I would imagine that I was an alien, dreaming this whole world up with the aid of some strange device … a kind of cosmic reality video game. Like “The Sims” … but with really good graphics. I half expected that someday I would wake up, shake off my green tentacles, wipe the slime from my beak and turn off the “human” video game.

This hasn’t happened (yet).

That doesn’t mean that universe doesn’t have some video game like properties!

People like to think that time and space flow smoothly. When you walk down the street, the relationship between time and space seems to be a pretty fluid affair (for most people).

In video games, it’s not so fluid (albeit they look better now than when I was a kid). Both time and space are quantized into discrete quantities. Artificial choppiness. Frames per second and pixel resolution dominate the video game universe.

The real universe happens to be dominated by something called the Planck Constant in a similar respect. One Plank Length is apparently the resolving resolution of our universe.

This amounts to about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 meters.

Pretty small. Anything smaller than that falls into that horrible fuzz called Quantum Mechanics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle takes over and the concept of “knowing” anything goes out the window.

If someone were to try and measure a distance smaller than one Planck Length with a high enough energy photon, they would theoretically create a mini-black hole. This probably wouldn’t be a good thing.

There are also corresponding units of Planck time, mass, temperature and so forth.

Summary Haiku:

the universe is
quantized, a video game
with awesome graphics

Everyone is throwing their old CRT TVs into the trash heap and replacing them with a crisp new LCDs. Maybe I’ll hold off until they release the “True to the Planck Length” model.