Dave Zan
Active Member
...assum[e] 10 to the minus 33 seconds is the smallest quantum of time...
Carlo Rovelli's book "The Order of Time" and on p83 he says the quanta of time, or Planck time, is "around" 10 to the -44 seconds...11 orders...difference!
Don't want to be too serious in a humour thread but it turns out some of the jokes are actually quite close to the truth, must be the technical talent in ASR!
The context is that the Planck time is the numerical value of a certain combination of fundamental physical constants, it's not clear that it must necessarily correspond to any "quantum" of time.
The problem is, as Paul says, that the Planck time is around 10 to the -44 seconds and therefore so small as to be beyond any possible chance of direct experimentation.
So the idea in the source paper is (more or less) that it is possible to detect indirect effects of quantisation, similar to jitter, much better than we can directly measure small time intervals.
Even with an audio DAC and frequencies around ~20 kHz we can measure the effects of jitter in the order of a nanosecond or so (dependent on the noise floor etc).
So they look for effects in very stable oscillators and determine the hypothetical "time quantisation" jitter must be less than 10 to minus 33 seconds.
That sets a limit value for time quantisation, the frequency can be at least that so we haven't reached the DSD limit yet
It's impressive to reach 10 to the -33 but it's still 10 to the 11 short of Planck time.
End of pedantic bit, I don't want to spoil the fun (unless anyone actually likes more real physics discussion)
Best wishes
David
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