Chat with our AI personalities
The smallest unit is the Planck Length. Theoretically, it is not that there can be nothing smaller, but for various reasons that have nothing to do with the limits of technology there is nothing that can be known about anything that happens to be smaller. For scale, the number of Planck Lengths in the diameter of a proton is 10 to the twentieth power.
Planck length and Planck time Planck time is the time it would take a photon moving at the speed of light in a vacuum to cross a distance equal to the Planck length. The Planck length is 1.616252 × 10−35 meters, and the Planck time is 5.39121 × 10−44 seconds. Links are provided to the relevant Wikipedia articles.
Yes, there are units smaller than a yoctometer. The yoctometer (10^-24 meters) is part of the metric system, and smaller units can be defined using scientific notation, such as zeptometer (10^-21 meters) or even smaller hypothetical units, like the Planck length, which is approximately 1.616 x 10^-35 meters. However, these smaller units are primarily theoretical and not commonly used in practical measurements.
It has no specific name. It is unusual, though, because its length is smaller than its width!
Generally speaking, yes. But, if you want to be pedantic about it, the answer must be NO. You cannot see accurately enough. Are you eyes good enough to go down to a micrometre? A nanometre? The width of an atom? The Planck length? NO. You cannot design an instrument that can be accurate below Planck's length. So, in the final analysis, you can't.