Then what is 2?
It doesn’t make sense to me to read it as a single unit of dumbass. I think it’s supposed to say “1, dumbass”. God admonishing the person.
The actual answer is
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because the universe had to pick a finite number and it probably doesnt use meters as an internal measurement ruler for scaling so it’s an arbitrary large random number to us.
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Why did it have to pick a finite number? Because it has finite lifespan and resources for actualization. This forces hard speed limit.
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The speed of light has nothing to do with light it’s a shitty name that makes understanding its true nature needlessly complex.
In actuality all massless waves/particles including photons, gravitational waves, and neutrinos will move at the speed of light, because thats as fast as anything massless can go. Its a universal speed limit for any real mass-particle, which is ultimately governed by Planck’s constant and the symmetry preservation of Penrose spacetime diagrams. Its the speed of causality a universal framerate limit that tells us the universe flows/computes through discrete microstates with ultimate precision limit bounds.
Nice description. I enjoyed your argument. Just a small correction from my side, neutrinos aren’t massless. They are very, very low mass though, and so naturally move very close to c.
You seem smart.
Can I ask you a question about the speed of light? We measured it as whatever we measured it recently. As in not 13-14 billion years ago. We also noticed that the expansion on the universe is getting faster.
Is it possible that the speed of light changed since the big bang? We just assume it’s the same but what if light (photons or whatever) started off slower and gradually speed up and got more efficient. Kinda like speed runners in video games. We wouldn’t have noticed the changed because we measured it after it got faster. And now with the universe expanding faster, maybe light is getting even more quick.
I heard the idea on a YT video and I’ve been thinking about it.
What your asking directly stems from two related open ended philosophy-of-science questions. These would be " Are universal constants actually constant?" and “Does the speed of light differ in speed at any point of time in its journey between two points of space in a continuous substrate?”
The answer to both like all philosophy questions is a long hit on the pot pipe and a “sure man, its possible but remains unlikely/over engineering the problem until we have justification through observing it” however I’ll give my two cents.
“” Are universal constants actually constant?" " it probably depends on the constant. Fundamental math stuff that tie directly into computations logic and uncertainty precision limits like pi are eternal and unchanging. More physics type constants derived from statistical distribution like the cosmological constant might shift around a little especially at quantum precision error scales.
The speed of light probably is closer to the first one as its ultimately about mathematically derived logical boundaries on how fast any two points universe can interact to quantize a microstate. Its a computational limit and I don’t see that changing unless the actual vaccum substrate of spacetime takes a sudden phase shift.
“Does the speed of light differ in speed at any point of time in its journey between two points of space in a continuous substrate?”
Veritasium did a good video about this one. The answer is its possible but currently unmeasurable . so if all hypothesis generate the same effective results then the simplest among them (light maintaining a constant speed during both ways of trip) is the most simple computationally efficient hypothesis among them.
So… I am not a scientist, just an enthusiast. But my understanding is that the speed of universe expansion doesn’t correlate with the speed of light. The speed of light is still constant.
Instead, the universe expansion rate is measured via something called the “doppler effect”. Scientists are able to use telescopes and take a snapshot of the night sky. Stars that tend to be brighter and more blue are closer to us. And stars that tend to be darker and more red are farther away from us. By taking snapshots and comparing it with previous snapshots over a long period of time, we are able to see a difference in color in each star which then shows us which stars are moving closer and which stars are moving further away.
Thus by measuring the speed at which the doppler effect changes, they can determine an estimate and compare whether the universe is expanding or shrinking and the speed at which it expands or shrinks over time without breaking the cosmic speed limit that is the speed of light.
Another analogy for the doppler effect is that it’s similar to what happens when a train passes by us. But in the case of a train, the doppler effect is with sound. As the train gets closer, the sound gets louder and seems more higher pitched. Then when the train passes us and gets further away, the sound fades away and gets lower pitched. All the while though, the speed of the train is still constant.
Hope that makes sense. And anybody that knows more than me feel free to correct me. ;-)
Do you really believe that in all of eternity, we happen to be just four and a half billion years in? We are probably on our infinite life, and have infinite more to go. Just completely random lives, no idea where we will end up, nothing persists.
What’s so special with four and a half billion years (or 13.8 billion years, if you measure from the big bang instead of the formation of the Solar system and Earth) that makes it so weird for us to “just happen to be” during that time?
Do you really believe that in all of eternity, we happen to be just four and a half billion years in? We are probably on our infinite life, and have infinite more to go. Just completely random lives, no idea where we will end up, nothing persists.
Yes I do, though must clarify its the earth that is estimated 4.5 billion. the universe itself is currently estimated at 13.8 billion years since big bang.
There’s a difference between the philosophical idea of an eternal process of cosmological rebirth, and the experimentally observed behaviors of the current universe we live in captured with our most powerful instruments and our best mathematical models.
In the 20th century we built telescopes powerful enough to see into the very distant universe and track the movement of galaxies. Because of this technological achievement we observed some strange things.
First was that galaxies seemed to be moving further and further away from each other. Not only that, they were moving away at an accelerating pace. This uncovered the idea of cosmological expansion, that over time our universe “spreads out” and creates new space between already distant objects.
Second, because the speed of light is finite, this creates fundamental limits to how far we can observe (the cosmological horizon) and a crazy cool phenomenon where the further you look into the distant universe the further back in time you look due to the age of the light from the star and the distance it traveled. We can literally see how the universe looked billions of years ago and calculate how far back we are looking.
If you look back far enough with extremely low frequency radio telescopes you can map out the thermal radiation from when the universe was extremely hot and dense about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This is called the Cosmic Microwave Background. It shows the universe was in a very condensed high energy state.
Third, we have concepts such as the second law of thermodynamics that says entropy increases in closed systems. Energy always spreads out and systems tend toward disorder on a global level. We have equations that very accurately describe this distribution.
With these breakthroughs we had enough data to simulate accurate matter distributions of the current universe, observe and accurately model matter distributions in the distant past, and use that model to find a best prediction of what may happen in the future with what we currently know. All three lines of evidence point to a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old with a definite beginning and end state.
This can still be reconciled with spiritual beliefs if your willing to redefine eternity to something more like an eternal cycle of rebirth with the heat death of one universe bootstrapping the creation of the next iteration. You may enjoy Futuramas bit on it.
Well this thread got a hell of a lot more interesting than I expected… That was an amazing explanation thank you
I have no religious beliefs. The thing that trips me up is how is there matter in the first place if none can ever be created? Why was there stuff at a single point at some time?
I have no religious beliefs. The thing that trips me up is how is there matter in the first place if none can ever be created? Why was there stuff at a single point at some time
The “matter/information can’t be created or destroyed” thing only applies to closed systems within their own operational bounds. It’s about logical consistency within a closed set, but that tells us nothing about where the closed set itself came from. All the energy from the big bang/first universal iteration was loaned from somewhere else. The how and why of this is probably going to remain a mystery forever because our simulations of the laws of physics can’t go back to before the big bang.
So the nature of the big bang and why anything exists is one of the big open-ended philosophy-of-science questions that there isn’t an easy falsifiable answer to. It’s up to interpretation. I have my own theories on the topic but any guess is as good as another.
From the good old classic “Because God Did It™” to “bubble universes that foam out from a hyperdimensional substrate with random laws of physics/math that sometimes allow for observation and life” and everything in between. It’s all the same to me because we can’t prove anything one way or the other.
My favorite is random fluctuations causing space to “borrow” matter. That we are just an imbalance. I don’t know, but one thing that is certain is if there is a chance of it happening, it will happen inevitably.
Fine, I concede until we have more science shit.
Username checks out.
Ah yes, disagree with me = Dumb.
Well, to be fair, you are talking about “infinite life”, and even a collective (“our”) infinite life, which unfortunately makes no sense. Mind you, the comment you are replying to, where the universe apparently has agency, is equally as scientifically valid.
And to be even more fair - it’s in your own username.That said, there’s no reason for name calling.
Fair enough. It makes more sense if you are a reductionist, and you also deduce that matter coming into being makes no sense, and that it could probably happen the same way again.
It also makes no sense that there would be nothing for an infinite amount of time, then the universe just pops into being one day, and we happen to be those lucky few that come to exist by sheer chance.
It’s more likely that the universe just has boom and bust cycles. Over time, through sheer randomness, it comes into being again. I don’t believe there is anything so special about us that can’t be recreated by sheer randomness. If we are just patterns, any pattern that can happen, can happen again as well.
So there we go. There are a lot of things that aren’t clear, like how specific does this pattern have to be (do we have to start with the exact same lives? Or will we be some alien snails with mild sentience).
When you say it “makes no sense” or it “makes more sense”… based on what? Because there was a lot of science in the comment above to base things on. But your comment seems more like its based on feels.
Mostly just deduction I suppose. Whatever, if I ever retire, and ever recover, I will finally be able to study these things.
It also makes no sense that there would be nothing for an infinite amount of time
Time only started existing after the Big Bang. Before that, there was nothing.
deleted by creator
Eh, perhaps.
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Because the CPU runs at 300GHz.
1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We’ll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
Nah, C is C. Who cares about the current hot measurements of space and time on a little rock, outside of us?
that is the linear rate at which dumbassery expands, yes. also light, but that’s because as yet tachyons remain hypothetical/fictional and i figure dumbassyons would travel faster than light were it possible.
like how sometimes you can look at someone or something and think “some dumbass is going to do some dumbass shit here soon” even though the dumbassery has not yet begun.
Dumbassion pilot wave theory
Dumbassions Creed
Dumbassions Creed 2: The Curse of Jackie’s Gold Tooth
Is it “dumbass” (a single word) or is it “dumb/ass” (relation)?
So dumb/ass = c
Multiply both sides by ass.
Dumb = c*ass
Hmmmmmmmm
Fucking knew it, Cassandra!
Both meters and seconds are units of Earth specific measures of space and time. Pretty sure at a cosmic scale god would give fuckall about how we measure and name our shit
If a god existed and gave a so much of a shit about our masturbatory habits he’d be at least tangentially aware of what the fuck a meter was.
For a second i thought you were calling the metric system masturbatory and then i remembered that christians really do think god watches them jork it. Kinky
There’s a Family Guy episode referencing that.
Actually most constants have been standardized to natural sources. A meter is now a fixed (small) fraction of the speed of light in vacuum. A second is pegged to the duration of a Cesium isotope spinning or something. Just that the multipliers are chosen to be convenient to us.
Should we need to talk measurements with aliens, we can, and can convert between their units and ours.
1 Meter = x umthilions plancs. There, retrospectively defined. In that sense.
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.
What’s more profound is that math is universal - after some teething pains with regards to understanding conventions, any alien technology should be comprehensive by us, and vice versa.
math is universal
Well… up to the base calculation methods. Logic is universal. Math is a set of rules. Aliens might rule different.
I would say (not an expert) math is a representation of (numerical) logic, and as it gets more complex, the conventions if representing logical ideas need to be laid out. But that said, once done (teething pains), a learned and read peer “in the art” should be able to both comprehend and communicate at least mathematical ideas, and as a (gradual) extension to this, applied technology.
Put another way, ‘greek’ ideas should be easier to communicate with than ‘latin’ ideas.
However all bets out the window if aliens have a straight up ‘God’ that just gives them stuff and they are themselves dumb as doornails. In which case we have a few common denominators already living it up.
“Wait you all started with base 60 and left it? It took us millenia to realize that it was the best choice, and once we did we never looked back”
Well, akshually they started out as being earth specific, as convenient ways to measure human-relevant amounts of space and time, and were standardized after that. So really God still wouldn’t care to use meters or seconds, but would probably have their own units which could also be standardized with natural phenomena.
Right but the actual quantities are arbitrary. A metre is a fixed fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, but it’s an arbitrary fraction chosen because it was convenient. We could just as well have chosen it to be half or twice as long. Same with the second. And the kilogram, etc.
What about imperial system?
/hj
IIRC it’s currently defined based on SI units.
An inch is just a special term for 2.54cm used by Americans (but not our government)
Also “in a vacuum” would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
Except all the gases and dust. What we know as space vacuum is not empty. Go to a great void for real vacuum.
Wait, maybe C would be 300’000 km/s there?
i’ve just figured out how the religious universe ends. some physicist explains to their god that a lot of their assumptions were based on something being in a vacuum, and then their god says “what vacuum? you mean all that sparse hydrogen?” so the physicist says “let’s find out what happens when you have a real vacuum” and then the universe ends at the speed of dumbassery.
Ah so THAT’S the resolution to the false vacuum hypothesis
It’s neat to think about what units an alien civilization would come up with independently. Like the Plank Distance is fundamental to physics, so they’d probably have something for that.
Degrees Celsius is based on freezing and boiling point of water, so if they came up with a base 10 numbering system and water is key to their biology, then they’d probably come up with that.
A calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1L of water by 1C. A liter is a volume of a cube 0.1m on each side. The meter was originally ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and north pole (and subsequent redefinitions are based on that original measurement). They wouldn’t come up with the meter, and they wouldn’t come up with liters or calories, either.
You might enjoy the book Project Hail Mary if you haven’t read it!
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
Degrees Celsius is based on freezing and boiling point of water, so if they came up with a base 10 numbering system and water is key to their biology, then they’d probably come up with that.
Waters boiling point isn’t a constant though… it’s dependent on the atmosphere.
Hell there’s also no telling if our preference to base 10 is relative to our number of fingers so neither of those are givens.
Base 10 is also cultural. Babylon used 60, ancient Egypt had 12 (they counted on the bones in their fingers), Rome had 5, and my wife just spent 10 minutes arguing for 8
All maths is done in base 10.
Because of Al-Kwarazimi. Hindu-Arabic math is base 10 and Al-Kwarazimi developed a really good method for doing math as well as inventing algebra. Base 10 spread with his methods. It looks like the Chinese were also using base 10 as far back as during the Shang dynasty. Meanwhile Europeans and their cultural descendants still use base 5 for ceremonial purposes (yes, even in MMXXV)
As an engineer life would be easier if we all thought in base 12, for my wife as a computer scientist life would be easier if it was in 2^n. 10 is a really convenient sized number for arithmetic and algebra though. Babylon was insane i genuinely can’t imagine trying to teach children the name and order of 60 digits to the point of instinctive mathematical understanding
Hopefully they’d come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
Every base is base 10 dumdum
1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21…
That’s true. It should really be referenced by the number before 10 (e.g. Base 9 for 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10).
Woah, I had never considered that. To think, all these years I was on the side of “initial index is 1.” I’ve unknowingly been using “initial index is 0,” since I started using numbers.
oh-my-god-i-get-it-now.jpeg
Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
And as we know, dumbasses are quick.
Nothing travels faster than stupidity.
Have we broken the bad news barrier? Science is amazing!
It turns out the bad news particle is composed of one up ass, one strange ass, and one dumboson
“'A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.
Douglas Adams
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
Terry Pratchett
Homie had such an awe inspiring mastery of the English language.
MFW I get a ticket for going 5.374x10-8 dumbasses in a 4.633x10-8 dumbasses zone
It works as a metric thing: “54 nD in a 46nD zone”.
(nano Dumbass)It was my understanding that dumbass is an imperial unit.
Your rate of dumbassery was too high
Leave at least half of that ass at home if you’re going to drive ma’am
I wholeheartedly agree.
There are various systems of units where select physical constants are set to 1. A handy comparison chart is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units?wprov=sfla1
It turns out you can’t harmonize all the physical constants. Some will necessarily end up as some non-round number.
Most of them have speed of light = 1, but some have it as 1/α where α is the fine-structure constant (α = e² / 4πε₀ħc ≈ 0.007297)
I understand nothing I’ve just read but I’m glad you science folk have fun and funding.
Fun yes.
Funding? What’s that?
Come on, you are able to analize words! Fun is obviously fun, and ding is obviously an abbreviation for dingbats, so fun-ding is having fun with dingbats!
Come on, you are able to analize words!
No, you can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. I did everything I could to analyze this topic. There are many things that are possible to analize. Many household items. But not words.
That sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams book.
IMO it might be better to only look at natural units that don’t depend on the specific properties of matter (i.e. proton mass, electron charge, …)
arguably, there could be an alien civilization in our universe that is purely made of exotic matter somewhere really far away, we simply haven’t found it yet. It’s purely made of exons and kaions and yppsons and particles that don’t exist on earth, where an exon has a positive charge of 1.456… proton charges and an yppson has a negative charge of -4.132… proton charges and so on.
therefore i consider physical constants such as ħ and c and G more fundamental than e and such, because those numbers would be the same even for exotic matter, i claim.
then, is that reduced set of natural constants harmonizable?
A quick glance at the summary table can answer that. Planck units seem to do the trick.
They call him Maxxie! Maxxie! Faster than lightning. No one you see / is measureier than he!
I like the Stoney Units, I feel appreciated.
Anyone come up with a good measure of distance that makes the speed of light a nice round number? I like the metric system, but the meter feels pretty arbitrary. We could do better!
Not arbitrary.
Since 2019, the meter has been defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyper-fine transition frequency of caesium.
I mean, that is pretty arbitrary. The reason the divisor is that specific constant is because we already had meters before we knew the speed of light.
we already had meters before we knew the speed of light.
It’s true.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the metric system.
Genesis 1:3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Then the devil created Britain.
Then it’s lucky the numbers line up as well as they do, no?
One light year is 9.4607379e+15 meters, so there’s a power of 10 that could give us a unit of length close to 94 cm. That would not be as arbitrary.
But fuck me if we discover the speed of light in a vacuum has not been constant along the history of the universe, the c would be an awful base for cosmic distance, or very long term science.
But don’t worry, humanity doesn’t look like it will exist long enough to do very long term science.
Yes and no. Humanity is doing a great job at fucking itself in to extinction (along with most other megafauna species on this planet), but astrophysicists/astronomers already have to deal with the entire history of the universe to explain things.
299792458? That’s amazing; I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!
Fluff you that made me snort.
Not arbitrary, pretty close to 1/40000 the N-S circumference of the earth
You are correctly trying to say it’s well defined, but you are complaining about the wrong comment. You should check the meaning of “arbitrary” again.
Anyway, it’s not entirely arbitrary because it was created to represent a “round” fraction of the Earth’s circumference that is similar to the length of a person’s arms. But it deviated from that too, so it’s subjective how much that counts.
Why use a ratio of the length of the Earth? Why not the Moon? Or the Sun? Or Mars?
Because people weren’t traveling around the moon, mars, or the sun back then, they were traveling around the earth :V
Ah, so it is arbitrarily human experience that defines these things, I see.
Yeah, in history we’ve really been ignoring the experiences of the sunwalkers, but thankfully society is leaving those prejudices in the past now.
It’s all arbitrary one way or another, but the meter was (seemingly) chosen for a specific purpose, creating a unit based on a good and verifiable frame of reference (though probably not as absolute as people thought back then), while also having 1 meter be a convenient and useful measure on a human scale.
It’s all arbitrary one way or another,
Exactly, yes.
c is pretty round (universal symbol for the speed of light)
aside from that, nothing. as science and maths are mere attempts at describing the universe all our units are arbitrary, decided to be the way they are purely because you just need to pick something to be your reference point.
at no point has a true non-artificial unit emerged, there is no constant size of anything that could aid in that (one contestant for that title could be the planck lenght but that’ss just incredibly inconvenient to use. "honey could you pelase move the couch 6,25 × 1034 planck lengths to the left? [1m])
Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.
proton masses are rather small - inconvenient
the distance light travels at a certain time - then it’ll just be based on our artificial units of time
cesium oscillation i don’t know much about but from what i quickly read it’s also about keeping time, 1s to be precise, which is still an arbitrary unit
Time can be non arbitrarily defined as a round number value of times cesium oscillates between two hyperfine states, to allow time to be non arbitrary and still a useful size.
The round number would still be arbitrary, no? It’s roundness would be based on the base 10 counting system, which is also arbitrary.
Not arbitrary. Base 10 because we usually have 10 fingers and those are useful for learning counting. If you have to choose a base, 10 is a good option for humans.
That’s still an arbitrary number to pick, and the choice of cesium oscillation seems pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.
fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it…
To be fair, literally everyone rounds pi, since it’s transcendental.
I like the idea of basing everything off fractions of the speed of light, but still keeping base ten. Define 1 year as the time it takes for Earth to go around the sun(somewhat arbitrary in that its human centric, but the alternative seems to be defining it based off an arbitrary phenomena or an arbitrary factor of the planc length). Define 1 month as one tenth of that, and so forth. Admittedly our days wont line up with the day night cycle, but who needs that? Days are arbitrary anyways, and only matter to ensure your factory workers show up as soon as theyre legally allowed to.
Edit: kinda half /s for the last half
i’m a fan of 13 months 28 days each & would love to see more of base 20 around tbf, for some reason base 20 feels cozy to me
Math isn’t arbitrary. Otherwise there wouldn’t be constant debate about whether it’s a human creation or fundamental to any existence.
natural laws of the universe can be described with our maths. but i’m pretty sure the universe didn’t go “ah yes, 1+2=3 i can work with that! let there be light”.
the numbers, the symbols, the equations - they’re all human made, an attempt to describe things in a way that can be understood by us. but is this how they are? of course not. no wave or particle would describe itself the way we describe them, in fact they wouldn’t describe themselves at all - they simply are
The operations and concepts they represent exist with or without humans.
In many advanced physics fields, they use an arbitrary unit system in which c=1, making equations easier to write down. E=m
That is the least arbitrary unit system. It’s the only unit that actually matters. Meters are arbitrary, in that it’s a number chosen to be useful to humans. The speed of light isn’t. It’s a measurement of a natural phenomenon, which we didn’t decide. (arguably, the time measurement is arbitrary though.)
The choice to fixate on it is arbitrary, though. That the math is easier when C=1 doesn’t really mean that C is 1 any more than it is 299,792,458. C is C. The 1 is convenient.
I would like to give a massive shout out to the fact that a foot is only 5mm off from being a light nanosecond. (Pure coincidence, but imagine if the next God emperor of America changed the foot definition by 5mm to make a truly science based unit of measurement.)
The meter isn’t really arbitrary, even when you ignore the redefinition posted by @jumperalex. It was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from Earth’s pole to the equator, which is a pretty reasonable basis to use by 1791 standards.
That’s pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale
Everything is pretty arbitrary on a universal scale. Except the speed of light. Which is really fucking slow on a universal scale too.
But not arbitrarily.
True, but it was the 18th century. They could measure earthly things well enough, not so much photons.
It’s a bit of a shame it wasn’t redefined as 1/300,000,000th of the distance light travels in a second when it was redefined, but the redefinition was about 50 years too late for that to happen. A difference of 0.07% in the base unit of measurement used by all science would’ve been far too much for 2019, given all the precision measurements we do these days.
That’s still arbitrary. The definition is just something that gave a result that was a useful scale for humans. There’s no reason to pick that over, say, the average distance to the moon, or something else. That distance is just fairly easy to measure and reasonably consistent over time. There are other choices for it though. The 1/10,000,000 is just whatever number was needed to make it useful. Nature doesn’t care about that distance, unlike the speed of light.
Nature doesn’t care about anything. It is not a conscious thing. The size of the Earth, however, is a natural phenomenon, just like the speed of light. It just isn’t a universal constant, relatively unchanging though it may be.
A multiplier is obviously going to be necessary whatever the base measure, because there’s no universal constant that happens to be of a useful, human scale. Or I guess you could use something like the wavelength of the hydrogen line – about 21.1 cm, a fairly useful length – but that isn’t really inherently a special wavelength, it just happens to be useful in radio astronomy.
The specific chosen points to measure are not natural. The size of the earth is relative to where you pick those points. Sure, it is natural that those two points exist, but choosing them isn’t. Any two points any the universe exist naturally. Picking two points to measure is not.
Yeah, to make it useful to humans it needs a scaler. No one is saying that isn’t true. That doesn’t make it any less arbitrary.
I think it’s (1 Planck length / 1 Planck time). If you take the smallest distance that exists and divide it by the shortest amount of time that can pass, you have exactly c.
If you take the smallest distance that exists and divide it by the shortest amount of time that can pass
btw that’s a nonsensical argument. there can be both space and time smaller than that.
Since the 1950s, it has been conjectured that quantum fluctuations of the spacetime metric might make the familiar notion of distance inapplicable below the Planck length.[23][37][22] This is sometimes expressed by saying that “spacetime becomes a foam at the Planck scale”.[38] It is possible that the Planck length is the shortest physically measurable distance, since any attempt to investigate the possible existence of shorter distances, by performing higher-energy collisions, would result in black hole production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_length
Same is true for the Planck time, although the English Wikipedia is oddly blank for that one: there can be no space or time smaller than that within the physics that we have come up with.
welllll i say that’s a reaaaly sketchy and irrational way to look at things.
like, even if you smallest ruler is 1 mm, that does not mean that smaller things don’t exist. they can still play a role, i.e. through chaotic behavior smaller perturbations could be up-amplified until they are measurable.
welllll i say that’s a reaaaly sketchy and irrational way to look at things.
Okay? You be you, I guess. I mean, stupid physicist eggheads, what do they know?
i don’t like trusting “experts” in fact. trusting “experts” is how we got into this mess. people let themselves be manipulated by the media. people need to think for themselves. yes, that includes not believing certain scientific results, but IMO it’s better to discard a scientific result that i cannot follow myself instead of becoming an authoritarian (i.e. one who believes in authors, i.e. other people’s writing) dependent.
Aaaahhhhh, you’re one of those… Good to know. Yeah, your reply makes sense then. Also thanks for telling me early in the discussion that you’re just a science denialist, then we don’t need to waste precious time with a discussion about things that you’ll just disregard at will anyway.
ok, go measure it then dumbass
The common octopus can grow anywhere from 1 to 1.3 meter
that is not arbitrary at all!
I have for my worldbuilding project, but it’s not famous or anything.
In base 12, there are 2 000 000 000 cesium oscillations in a tik (about 1.12 seconds), and light travels 80 000 000 mata in a tik (a mata is about 0.85m)
We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.
Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.
100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1’.
The speed of light is one lightyear per year
Only problem – which year? They’ve got different lengths.
Just use the speed of light as base and measure the distance in time units (implying *c). 100 psc (lightpicoseconds) are a bit more than 1⅛ inch, 4 ~ 1 mm, 1 nsc (lightnanosecond) is 1 foot or 29.9 cm, 1 μsc (lightmicrosecond) ~ 299 m. Would be totally possible. Within city boundaries we should introduce a speedlimit of 1 pc (picolightspeed), pretty easy to implement.
Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.
A Lightyear?
Year is an incredibly arbitrary length
All lengths are arbitrary.
Years measure time, not distance
Yes, but it’s part of the definition of a light-year, i.e. the distance light travels in a vacuum within one Julian calendar year. Using a year as reference to the distance light travels within a given timeframe is fairly arbitrary. We could just as well use light-months, or light-decades, or some entirely different timeframe as reference.
On addition, we could measure year by a different planet. To the universe, choosing the time it takes the Earth to move around the sun one time is pretty arbitrary. Why not Mars? Or why not a totally different star system?
Speed = Distance over time.
There are no measurements of speed that won’t face that problem.
Anyone come up with a good measure of distance that makes the speed of light a nice round number? I like the metric system, but the meter feels pretty arbitrary. We could do better!
Originally, the meter was defined as one ten millionth the distance from the north pole to the equator, as it runs through Paris. The unit and system were picked for ease of use for day to day activities. It is also tied to the attributes of our planet, which is also how we derived the time units that we use.
That’s the opposite of arbitrary, no?
It’s the definition of arbitrary. There’s no reason to pick those specific things to base your system on. They picked them because they’re easy to measure and have a reasonably consistent value over time. Then they divide it by some number that makes it useful on a human scale. There’s nothing fundamental that lead to those values being chosen. They were just useful. Nature doesn’t work on meters. It does work on the speed of light. It is a fundamental unit of nature (excluding the unit of time, which is obviously not fundamental, but we could use any measure of time).
There’s no reason to pick those specific things to base your system on.
If you’re not a human, and not living on earth, and are unconcerned with the day to day activities of humans as they go about their lives on earth, I tend to agree.
Most people on earth don’t care much about Paris. If you ask 1000 people on earth to do this measurement you’d probably get 1000 different answers. Picking the line that goes through Paris is just a random choice that got enough agreement.
Most people on earth don’t care much about Paris. If you ask 1000 people on earth to do this measurement you’d probably get 1000 different answers. Picking the line that goes through Paris is just a random choice that got enough agreement.
It must be so exhilarating for you, asserting your opinions on weights and measures.
It took me awhile to understand the punchline (god is saying the speed of light is 1 dumbass, not calling the person a dumbass as I first thought). Does that mean the speed of light is slow?
I thought the joke was calling the person a dumbass because the speed of light is a constant and therefore having it be 1 makes a lot of sense when looked at from a universal scale. The only reason a meter isn’t a clean division of the speed of light is because we defined the meter before we decided to make it a division of c.
I think it means the instead that we made up measurements to measure the speed of light, but the God in this meme doesn’t use manmade measurements, so it’s just 1 (like 1c). Since the speed of light is the max theoretical speed of anything in the universe, it makes sense that anything else could be measured in fractions of it.
Yeah I’m with you, because I don’t understand why a “dumbass” would be the speed of light.
Makes more sense for God to measure things in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
Speed of light in a true vacuum.
Speed of light through any non-vacuum decreases.
The speed of causality remains the same.
is the speed of causality tied to speed of light in a vacuum, or independent of it?
Is the speed of causation propagation linked to plank length?
Yes, more specifically the Planck length is derived from an equation involving the speed of light/causality.
Where C is light, h is reduced planck constant, and G is gravitational constant. Together they tell us the fundamental unit length of meaningful distinction, a very important yard stick for measuring the smallest distances.
As I understand, the speed of light in vacuum is bound by the speed of causality. So, light would go at infinite speed, if it could (it being massless means any acceleration should result in infinite speed), but instead it goes as fast as the universe allows, which is the speed of causality.
Speed of Causality is the absolute maximum speed. It’s the theoretical maximum that any cause could propagate an effect. Speed of Light in a (perfect) vacuum happens to be equal to the Speed of Causality.
Is the speed of causation propagation linked to plank length?
Yes, it’s derived from 4 physical constants including c
Independent.
There is no god
And the location of this “Shire” is most improbable!
Why is it improbable?
“Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?”
deleted by creator
Speed of light in vacuum is c. So, 1 c = 1 dumbass
