text: I believe the values you are referring to are the Planck length (1.61624 × 10^-35 m) and Planck time (5.39121 × 10^-44 s).  They are basically the smallest values that quantum physics can make sense of.\n\nImagine a cashier.  You work with money all day, sometimes large values, sometimes small.  But you never deal in anything less than a penny, because that is the smallest amount out there.  You might imagine something smaller, but since there is no coin for it, you can only work with pennies or larger.\n\nThe Planck units are the pennies of the universe, at least according to current theory.  But don't worry, they are very, very small.  The earth is 1.2745 x 10^8 m in diameter.  The smallest atoms are about 2.5 x 10^-11 m, or 19 orders of magnitude smaller.  The Planck length is 24 orders smaller still, so the difference between the size of an atom and the Planck length is greater than that of an atom and the entire planet.