{"id":105,"date":"2008-05-08T18:46:33","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T01:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/?p=105"},"modified":"2008-05-19T22:42:21","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T05:42:21","slug":"the-highest-resolution-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/08\/the-highest-resolution-possible\/","title":{"rendered":"The Highest Resolution Possible"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

This hasn’t happened (yet).<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean that universe doesn’t have some video game like properties! <\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

\"...<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"...<\/p>\n

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

This amounts to about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 meters. <\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

\"...<\/p>\n

There are also corresponding units of Planck time, mass, temperature and so forth. <\/p>\n

Summary Haiku:<\/p>\n

the universe is
\nquantized, a video game
\nwith awesome graphics<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n

The Highest Resolution Possible<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[189],"tags":[182,179,180,181,183,178],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","tag-black-hole","tag-graphics","tag-planck-constant","tag-plank-length","tag-quantum-mechanics","tag-resolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/armanbohn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}