Planck's Prank

Max Planck wasn’t just brilliant. He introduced an entirely new way of looking at the world, through the lens of quantum mechanics.

Prior to Planck, physicists grappled with puzzling inconsistencies in their theories.

After Planck, there was a general understanding that nature wasn’t smooth at all. Instead, it operated on a completely different principle than everyone who ever lived had previously assumed. It turned out that nature was quantized, meaning there is a tiniest thing, or a tiniest amount of distance, or a tiniest amount of time possible.

Today, we call these “Planck units.” The Planck length, for instance, is around 100 million trillion trillion times smaller than a proton. A proton, in turn, is 50,000 times smaller than an atom, and atoms are ten million times smaller than a grain of sand.

Sorry, Keanu. This one gets an OG mind=blown.gif reaction.

Planck’s ideas were so revolutionary that they encountered heavy resistance from eminent physicists. Convincing folks of this ne…