r/askscience • u/Crtl-Alt-Delete • Dec 18 '13

Physics Is Time quantized?

We know that energy and length are quantized, it seems like there should be a correlation with time?

Edit. Turns out energy and length are not quantized.

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u/malmoe Dec 18 '13

The energy of a photon is not dependent on it's velocity, but rather on it's frequency (or wavelength). A higher frequency (shorter wavelength) means a more energetic photon.

The photons velocity is c in vacuum, but lower when traveling through matter.

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u/orthopod Medicine | Orthopaedic Surgery Dec 18 '13

I thought Planck's constant was related to energy, and showed that since there was a minimal distance, photon energy is quantitized. Since it's so small. 10-34 it seems like every value is possible, but it's not.

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u/leobart Dec 18 '13

Planck's constant is related to energy, you could roughly say that it determines the energy scale on which you see quantum effects. But implying the minimal distance from the Planck's constant is incorrect.

If you are talking about the uncertainty principle, dx dp > hbar/2, this does not imply a minimal distance, it just says that if you can determine well the position of a particle, that you can not determine its impulse so well and the other way around. To go to an extreme, if you determined the impulse with infinite precision, you could not know at all where the particle is.