The Planck Length is sometimes seen as daunting! Here is an excellent explanation of it in just 90 seconds!

What is the smallest distance you can think of? If you thinking of something like the width of an atom or electron then you are way off the mark!There is a distance so unimaginably small that it makes distances comparable to an atom seem giant.

This distance is referred to as the Planck Length. The Planck Length is roughly 1.616x10^-35 meters long. However numbers to such an extreme value such as this are very difficult to comprehend so let us put it into perspective. The approximate smallest distance an unaided human eye can observe is about 0.1mm long. This is about the width of a single human hair. Now imagine expanding this distance to the size of the observable universe. How big would a planck length be? Coincidentally, a planck length would now be 0.1mm long. In other words, the width of a human hair is just as close in size to the observable universe than it is to a planck length.

The question that arises here is why is this the smallest distance? Why can’t we take measurements that deal with half a planck length? Or a quarter of a planck length? Although this concept works out well in mathematics, in the real world, things are much trickier. At the planck length, ordinary space and time cease to exist. There is possibly just nothing in between two individual planck lengths.Time on this level just skips across planck lengths, leaving nothing in between.

Distances smaller than the planck length inevitably boil down to the realm of quantum mechanics. Because quantum gravity dominates here, it becomes impossible to determine the difference between two locations less than a planck length apart.

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