{"id":198,"date":"2005-04-14T10:22:17","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T00:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/?p=198"},"modified":"2005-04-14T10:22:17","modified_gmt":"2005-04-14T00:22:17","slug":"the-so-called-breakdown-of-spacetime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/the-so-called-breakdown-of-spacetime\/","title":{"rendered":"The so-called breakdown of spacetime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An assertion which is often made is that quantum gravity effects will become important at the Planck length &#8212; about [tex]10^{-35}[\/tex] meters &#8212; and the notion of spacetime will break down at that length.    People like to wax lyrical about spacetime turning into some kind of &#8220;quantum foam&#8221; at that level.<\/p>\n<p>This bugs me.  If it really is the case, then why doesn&#8217;t the notion of mass doesn&#8217;t break down at the Planck mass, which has the rather hefty value of about [tex]10^{-8}[\/tex] kilograms?  What&#8217;s the critical difference between mass and length?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An assertion which is often made is that quantum gravity effects will become important at the Planck length &#8212; about [tex]10^{-35}[\/tex] meters &#8212; and the notion of spacetime will break down at that length. People like to wax lyrical about spacetime turning into some kind of &#8220;quantum foam&#8221; at that level. This bugs me. If&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/the-so-called-breakdown-of-spacetime\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The so-called breakdown of spacetime<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}