Did You Know? #8

What is a Planck length?

A Planck length is 1.6 x 10^-35 meters (the number 16 preceded by 34 zeroes and a decimal point). Because the Planck length is so many orders of magnitude smaller than any current instrument could possibly measure, there is currently no way of probing this length scale directly. Research on the Planck length is therefore mostly theoretical. According to the generalized uncertainty principle, the Planck length is in principle, within a factor of order unity, the shortest measurable length - and no improvements in measurement instruments could change that.