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If Planck’s constant were smaller than it is, would quantum phenomena be more or less conspicuous than they are now?

If Planck’s constant were smaller than it is, would quantum phenomena be more or less conspicuous than they are now?

Grade:12th pass

1 Answers

Pawan Prajapati
askIITians Faculty 60787 Points
3 years ago
Answer ::

Depends on what else you keep constant. Changing unitful quantities tells you nothing unless you say what else you keep constant.
The key part of this question is “what happens to human scales if you change h ?” E.g.: we might have evolved to be smaller, if h were smaller. This is because reducing h would also (depending on what you keep constant) reduce the Bohr radius, the size of a typical atom.
That said, taking this question in the sense it was asked, and neglecting technicalities of human evolution: some behavior, sure; other behavior, no.
For instance, Pauli’s exclusion principle would be exactly what it was before - and thus exactly as conspicuous (roughly speaking, anyway, in the sense that “once we observe atoms, we observe Pauli exclusion”).
However, “quantum corrections” to various quantities would indeed be smaller, as most of these are (naively - again, depending on what is constant) proportional to some positive power of h . These phenomena would be less conspicuous.

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