It is a truism of Special relativity that as one approaches the speed of light, one’s length contracts in the direction of flight; basically, one flattens out.
What if something was already only one planck length thick? AFAIK, the Pl is the quantum of space…an absolute. Would relativity make it shrink even thinner?
I’ll throw in something before a more knowing doper comes along.
In Special Relativity, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the shorter you are from their viewpoint. You won’t look any shorter to yourself.
That is, if a train was coming towards you at close to the speed of light, it would look shorter to you then if it were coming towards you at, say, 40 mph. The passengers on the train wouldn’t notice anything different when looking at each other or walking down the aisle toward the washroom. If they looked out the window at you while you were holding a yardstick, they would think your yardstick was short (and that you were thin).
Now we’re entering the part where I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. I assume that if you were in a space ship travelling really fast, someone watching you would measure the Planck length relative to you to be shorter than the Planck length they measured for themselves.
Hopefully I at least answered something among those ramblings.
Massive objects have a frequency and associated wavelength–that’s the limit on the utility of the electron microscope. An object about a million times smaller than a baseball has a wavelength just smaller than the Planck length.
The Planck length is not truly a quantum of space. It is the length where quatum effects take over so completely that the classical despriction of gravity has no meaning.
To answer this question, we would need a quantum theory of gravitation/relativity, which as far as I know does not exist in a generally accepted form.
“despriction”?