Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Planck Constant Of course, one explanation begs another: introducing the Planck constant helps explain phenomena that Newton could not explain, but the mystery now is the Planck constant itself: what is it, what does it represent? Newton’s physics (as well as Einstein’s physics) assumed that the most fundamental units of the universe were the point and the instant. Quantum Theory introduces a fundamental unit that is bigger than a point and an instant, and seems to be as arbitrarily finite as Newton’s points were infinitesimally small.  Unlike Newton’s points and instants, that have no size, the Planck constant has a size: a length, height and width of 10-33 centimeters and a time interval of 10-43 seconds. Einstein had warped space and time, but Quantum Theory did worse: it turned them into grids.  (One could even argue that the very notion of measuring a distance such as “10-33 centimeters” depends on Newton’s concept of space, and thus we don’t quite know what we mean when we say that Planck’s length is “10-33 centimeters”).   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters