The Planck Factor

DEDICATION

DEDICATION

For Nancy Mack and Ken

MacClune

“Suppose powerful accelerators managed to produce large

numbers of Planck mass particles and that somehow a bomb was made with them.

According to our theory, such a bomb would release exactly half the energy

released by a conventional nuclear weapon with the same overall mass. In other

words, such an expensive quantum gravitational weapon would be precisely half

as powerful as a much cheaper conventional nuclear weapon. For more massive

particles (say with masses equal to two or three times the Planck mass), the

result would be even worse. I was pleased to find that even generals would probably

not be dumb enough to hire Lee or me.”*

*Unfortunately, the possibility that Eρ might be negative reverses this

argument, as explained in our paper.

– João Magueijo, Faster

Than the Speed of Light (Perseus Publishing, 2003), pp. 252-253.