Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Dimensional analysis — where it appears

The construction of a quantity from the units of the constants it must depend on, which fixes an exponent and never a coefficient. It is at its most powerful when only one combination has the right dimensions, since then the scaling of the answer is known before any equation is solved.

Named by 10 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Where a body can no longer be any shape it likes. The tallest mountain a body can carry, against the body's radius, on logarithmic axes, beside the line on which a mountain would be as tall as the body. The first falls as 1/R and the second rises as R, so they cross exactly once — here at 282 km, for rock of 200 MPa strength and density 3000 kg/m³. Below that radius a body's own gravity cannot enforce anything and it stays whatever shape it was made; above it, the shape is decided by gravity and the answer is a sphere. The crossing moves as the square root of the strength, so it is an order of magnitude and not a boundary.

The size at which a body becomes round

A mountain can be no taller than the height at which the rock beneath it begins to crush, and that height falls as the body gets bigger — so there is a size above which a mountain would have to be taller than the world it stands on. Above it, nothing can be any shape but a sphere.

astrophysics · Self-gravity The two lengths every mass has. The Compton wavelength and the Schwarzschild radius of the same mass, against mass, on logarithmic axes. One falls and the other rises, so they cross exactly once — here at 1.539·10⁻⁸ kg and 2.286·10⁻³⁵ m, found by bisecting the difference rather than by writing down √(ħG/c³). The conventional Planck values are 2.176·10⁻⁸ kg and 1.616·10⁻³⁵ m; the crossing sits a factor of 1.414 away from them, which is exactly √2 and is the factor of two in the Schwarzschild radius coming through a square root. That is the whole precision this argument has, and it is worth saying, because a number written to four figures invites a reader to believe the definition is doing more work than it is. Nothing in physics is known at that length.

Where every model runs out at once

Every mass carries two lengths — one below which quantum mechanics will not let it be located, one below which gravity will not let anything escape. One falls with mass and the other rises, so they cross exactly once, at a length nothing in physics has ever probed.

astrophysics · Planck scale The current crowding into a contact spot. A meridional section through a circular contact between two solids, with the spot at the centre. The closed curves are equipotentials and the curves running through the spot are current lines, each carrying an equal share. Both are exact: in the coordinates built on the spot's rim the equipotentials are confocal spheroids and the current lines confocal hyperboloids, and in this section they are ellipses and hyperbolas. What the picture shows is that the current has to converge from a region many spot radii across and then spread again, and that the potential falls almost entirely within a few radii of the contact. The equipotential drawn at 12% of the drop sits 5.2 radii away, and everything beyond it contributes that last 12%.

The resistance that is a length

Two metals touching do not touch over the area they appear to. Current crosses at a few small spots and has to converge into each one, and the resistance of that convergence contains no area and no path length — only the size of the spot, divided into the resistivity.

electromagnetism · Conductors The motion that arrives late and does not go far. A flat plate sliding back and forth in its own plane, with the fluid above it drawn at 0°, 60°, 120°, 180° of the cycle. The speed at depth y is exp(−y/δ) times a cosine whose phase lags by y/δ, and both halves are checked: the largest speed reached at any depth follows exp(−y/δ) to a part in a thousand million, and the fluid one skin depth out is fastest a full radian after the plate is. Two skin depths out the motion is an eighth of the plate's and a quarter of a cycle behind; four skin depths out there is essentially nothing. Alternating shear does not diffuse away without limit — it fills a fixed depth and stops.

The shear that only reaches so far

Viscosity carries momentum sideways without limit when the driving is steady. Reverse the driving and it stops: the motion fills a depth set by the viscosity and the frequency, arrives there late, and beyond that depth the fluid does not know the wall exists.

fluids · Viscosity The wedge that proves it. A wedge of water 4 mm on its vertical side, at a depth of 3 m, with the pressure on each of its three faces as an unknown. The two force balances decide them. Horizontally, the sloping face's push has a component that must exactly cancel the vertical face's, and since the sloping face is longer by exactly the factor its slope reduces the component by, the two pressures are equal — the geometry cancels, at every angle, for every size. Vertically the same cancellation happens except for the wedge's own weight, which needs the bottom face to carry 0.0667 per cent more. That excess falls in proportion to the size of the wedge, so at a point it is nothing and the three pressures are one number. Pressure being the same in every direction is the conclusion of that argument, not an assumption in it.

The push that has no direction

That the pressure at a point in a still fluid is the same whichever way the surface faces is not a definition. It is a theorem, and its proof is an argument about how two kinds of force scale with size — which is also the exact statement of when it stops being true.

fluids · Hydrostatics The hourglass that keeps time. Discharge against how much is left above the opening, for grain and for liquid through the same 40 mm hole, each as a fraction of its own rate at a full hopper. The grain rate is a horizontal line: it does not appear in Beverloo's law at all, because the pressure at the outlet does not depend on the head — the walls carry the weight, which is what Janssen's argument establishes, so the grains at the opening are pushed by their immediate neighbours and by nothing else. The liquid falls as the square root of the head and is down to 32 per cent by the time a tenth is left. That is why an hourglass keeps time and a water clock does not, and why the water clocks that worked were built with a float and an overflow to hold the head constant.

The hourglass that keeps time

Grain leaves a hopper at a rate that does not depend on how much is above it, and that goes as the orifice to the five-halves power rather than the one half a liquid gives. Both facts follow from the same thing: the weight is carried by the walls, not by the grains at the opening.

fluids · Granular matter Two terms, and the distance neither can beat. The smallest distance a probe of a given momentum can resolve, as the sum of two terms. The falling one is the uncertainty relation: more momentum, shorter wavelength, finer resolution. The rising one is gravity: the probe's own energy curves the region it is probing, and past a point it makes a horizon larger than the thing being looked at. With the gravitational term at 1× the Planck area, the least resolvable distance is 2.286e-35 m — each located by scanning the drawn curve over four hundred thousand momenta rather than by substituting into a formula. There is no momentum at which the resolution is better than that, so the ordinary procedure for measuring a distance has a floor, and the floor is the Planck length up to a factor of order one.

The length no experiment can resolve

Measuring a small distance needs a short wavelength, a short wavelength needs a large energy, and a large energy in a small region makes a horizon. Past a point, pushing harder makes the probe bigger — and the distance where that turns round is the Planck length.

astrophysics · Planck scale The one prediction the Planck scale makes. The energy density the vacuum should have, from summing the zero-point energy of a field's modes up to a cutoff, against where that cutoff is put — thirty decades of cutoff energy and a hundred and thirty of density, both logarithmic. The horizontal line is what is measured: 5.34e-10 joules per cubic metre, the dark energy that accounts for sixty-nine per cent of the universe. Cutting the sum off at the Planck energy — which is where dimensional analysis says every description available runs out — overshoots it by 10^121. That is the largest disagreement between an estimate and a measurement anywhere in physics, and the slope of the line is why it cannot be argued away: the density goes as the fourth power of the cutoff, so cutting off at the electroweak scale still overshoots by 10^54 and cutting off at one electronvolt — below which no physics is in doubt at all — still overshoots by 10^8. The cutoff that would give the right answer is 8.0e-3 electronvolts, which is a wavelength of about a tenth of a millimetre and corresponds to no known physics whatever.

The estimate that misses by a hundred and twenty

Every argument about the Planck scale is an argument about consistency rather than about data, with one exception. The zero-point energy of the quantum fields gravitates, dimensional analysis at the Planck cutoff says how much, and what is measured is 10¹²¹ times smaller. It is the largest disagreement between an estimate and a measurement anywhere in physics, and lowering the cutoff does not rescue it.

astrophysics · Planck scale How large the hidden dimensions would have to be. The size extra dimensions would need, for gravity's true scale to be at a TeV rather than at 10¹⁹ GeV, against how many of them there are — a logarithmic axis of metres, for three choices of the true scale. The relation is the one that makes the arrangement work: the Planck mass observed in four dimensions is M_*^(2+n)Rⁿ, so gravity is weak because its field spreads into a volume nothing else can enter. Solved for R at a true scale of a TeV: 1 dimension needs 2.9e+13 m, 2 dimensions needs 2.4e-3 m, 3 dimensions needs 1.0e-8 m, 4 dimensions needs 2.2e-11 m, 5 dimensions needs 5.4e-13 m, 6 dimensions needs 4.5e-14 m. The two horizontal lines are where experiment has been. One extra dimension would have to be of order a hundred astronomical units, which would have wrecked the orbits of the planets and is excluded absolutely. Two would have to be of order a millimetre — which is what made the arrangement famous, because a millimetre is a distance a laboratory can test, and torsion balances have since verified the inverse-square law down to fifty-two micrometres and excluded it. Three or more sit below a nanometre, where no gravitational measurement reaches, and are untouched.

The scale that may not be where it looks

Every Planck number assumes gravity is four-dimensional all the way down. If it is not — if the field spreads into dimensions compact enough to have escaped notice — the true scale where gravity becomes strong could be at a TeV, and the whole remoteness of the Planck scale would be an artefact of where the field lines go. It is the one part of the subject an experiment can address, and the experiments have addressed it.

astrophysics · Planck scale 14 decades of fluid, and a floor none of them reaches. The ratio of viscosity to entropy density for 8 substances, in units of the proposed lower bound, on a logarithmic axis. The quantity is a viscosity divided by how much entropy a cubic metre of the substance holds, and it has the dimensions of Planck's constant over Boltzmann's — so a bound on it is a statement with no material properties in it at all. The span here is a factor of 1.6e+14, from pitch at 20 °C at the top to the quark–gluon plasma at the bottom, which sits a factor of 1.6 above the floor. The values marked as computed are worked out from a viscosity and a tabulated entropy; the rest are quoted from the compilations, because a minimum along an isobar is an inference from many measurements rather than a single one.

Whether a fluid can be made arbitrarily thin

Viscosity has no units anybody would call fundamental, and nothing obviously stops it being as small as you like. Divide it by the entropy in a cubic metre and the units become Planck's constant over Boltzmann's — and a conjecture from 2005 says that ratio has a floor. Across fourteen decades of ordinary fluid nothing has been measured below it, the closest thing to it is the hottest matter ever made, and a kinetic-theory argument reaches the same number from the opposite direction.

fluids · Viscosity

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Quantum gravityEnergyPlanck scaleScalingViscosityBlack holeEquilibriumFine tuningFrictionHydrostaticsMeasurementScattering

All concepts