Fictional
Fictional
Comments
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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
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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.
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Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
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Hopefully they'd come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
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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.
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You might enjoy the book Project Hail Mary if you haven’t read it!
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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.
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SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn't considered.
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Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
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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.
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1 Meter = x umthilions plancs. There, retrospectively defined. In that sense.
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What about imperial system?
/hj
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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.
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Also "in a vacuum" would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
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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.
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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?
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I think that is the joke of the posted image.
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People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
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Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
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1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We'll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
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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.
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Nah, C is C. Who cares about the current hot measurements of space and time on a little rock, outside of us?
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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)
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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?
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I like the Stoney Units, I feel appreciated.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not arbitrary, pretty close to 1/40000 the N-S circumference of the earth
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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])
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Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.
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fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it...
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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
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Math isn't arbitrary. Otherwise there wouldn't be constant debate about whether it's a human creation or fundamental to any existence.
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In many advanced physics fields, they use an arbitrary unit system in which c=1, making equations easier to write down. E=m
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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.)
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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.
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That's pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale
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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.
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The common octopus can grow anywhere from 1 to 1.3 meter
that is not arbitrary at all!
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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)
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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.
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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.)
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We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.
Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.
100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1'.
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The speed of light is one lightyear per year
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Only problem – which year? They've got different lengths.
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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.
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Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.
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See natural unit systems.
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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?
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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).
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The actual answer is
- 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.
- Why did it have to pick a finite number? Because it has finite lifespan and resources for actualization. This forces hard speed limit.
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. ;-)
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He’s not
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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.
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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.
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Username checks out.
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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?
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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.
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Speed of light in a true vacuum.
Speed of light through any non-vacuum decreases.
The speed of causality remains the same.
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is the speed of causality tied to speed of light in a vacuum, or independent of it?
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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.
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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.
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Independent.
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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.
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Because the CPU runs at 300GHz.
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Can somebody reupload the image at a non-feddit.org host? Feddit is incredibly annoying in that it geoblocks most of Asia.
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Wait what? Why?
Well apparently asia is the source of a lot of scraping traffic, and they're an European focused website, so they went with the nuclear option of blocking the entire continent and change. Never mind that as one of the bigger instances on the Threadiverse, they're degrading the user experience for an entire continent. I brought the issue up to them previously, but they didn't seem too concerned about it.
Example of degraded user experience for Asia:
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Sorry, your reply is still hosted on the feddit.org instance, it's still unavailable to me :(
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"Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?"
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Is there a unit for the distance light travels in a Plank time?
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Yes, the Planck length
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There is no god
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And the location of this "Shire" is most improbable!
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Why is it improbable?
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Then what is 2?
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Speed of stupidity.
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Physicists all around would start crying, that’s for sure
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Speed of light in vacuum is c. So, 1 c = 1 dumbass
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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Insert Einstein quote about stupidity
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God has no place in science.
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God has no place in science.
Thank god someone finally said this.
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Lol
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pls lighten up, it's not that serious
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lightens up
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Bless you
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This is Lemmy, baby! Nothing is too stupid to break down and ultimately ruin!!!
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If it turned out they exited, wouldn't you want to study them?
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I suspect what they meant is that the blind faith required by religion has no place in science. You're free to study gods, there's just unfortunately no evidence to get started with.
If evidence of one or more gods existed, there would of course be more reason to study them too.
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- if there's a god he or she or they are not benevolent. They fucking hate our ass to no end.
- that's pretty much it. The rest is dumb people dancing around the fire thinking the god will stop wars for them or make it rain. Just people showing up to a big man made cave to tell each other's sins so they can keep doing them.
And that's the top two full list of Everything you'd want to know about a god. Remember he basically gave us all the current events from the US to ruzzia to Israel. That guy did that. You want more? Keep praying. Where's my lottery? I'm almost dead and I still haven't won the lottery yet.
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He's a computer scientist. Light is either on or off; 1 or 0.
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But it has fractions, so its float.
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It's a meme.
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What? Light doesn't have speed, speed would imply some sort of relative movement that would require something like 3 spatial dimensions but even then everything would move at the same "speed" if you add up the dimensions the real question is why are you moving through space? And that gets into causality and a bunch of other God stuff you wouldn't be interested in.
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Username checks out.
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This reads like a "do your own research" type of person commented it.
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I think it’s a reference to light cones
The idea being that if you take relativity into account, everything is always moving “at the same speed”, it’s just something stationary is moving only in the time direction, and something moving in a spatial direction is therefore moving slightly slower in the time dimension.
I’ve heard this description before but I don’t think the math quite works out and it also doesn’t really explain why the speed of light is the speed limit.
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dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
And as we know, dumbasses are quick.
Nothing travels faster than stupidity.
MFW I get a ticket for going 5.374x10-8 dumbasses in a 4.633x10-8 dumbasses zone
Your rate of dumbassery was too high
It works as a metric thing: "54 nD in a 46nD zone".
(nano Dumbass)
I wholeheartedly agree.
"I was wondering where the units went" noted: c = 1 dumbass ≈ 3 * 10^8 m/s