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Jot that down.
The name’s, Dumas.
Why would god use dumbasses as the standard unit of philosophy?
'Cause there’s so many of them. It’s like using fruit flies for biological research.
It’s measuring speed, speed of light is 1 dumbass.
Which proves God is American (anything except metric)
I learned recently that it was the Babylonians who invented the hour and the minute as a unit of time, and they used base 60, which I thought was pretty neat. Then we created seconds and milliseconds in base 10.
IIRC, they picked 60 because it could be evenly divided into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, and 1/6 which allowed them to stick to whole numbers more easily.
If you use your thumb to count the sections of 4 fingers you get 12.
Then you hold up a finger on your other hand. When all 5 are up you have 60.
I have never accepted this explanation. Yes, using base 12 is logical and well documented. But that means you’ve got 12 on the other hand as well. 144 would’ve made more sense.
Yeah, what that user is describing is a mixed base system, which is pretty uncommon-- but then again, not for the people who invented time, since we have either 24|60|60 or 2|12|60|60 divisions for that. 5|12 would not be that weird.
Same reason there are 12 inches in a foot.
Any idea how they tracked time? AFAIK solar clocks are not consistent during the year. I can imagine some sort of water clock, but they would need a master one to use as reference or very accurate specifications to reproduce.
Solar clocks are consistent during the year because noon is always at local noon. They just stop telling time effectively early or later depending on the season (i.e. how long the sun is shining). You just measure time around noon and you are always accurate to local time (even the modern era navy did this). It only matters if you need to synchronize time from very far away, which ancient people didn’t really need to do do.
I mean in the sense of measuring hours. Is it a constant angle from noon to 13:00, for example?
Even the “local noon” would drift of you want you measure with constant hours of a24th of a day.
Is it a constant angle from noon to 13:00, for example?
Within a margin of a few minutes (i think 15 minutes at the most).
Even the “local noon” would drift of you want you measure with constant hours of a24th of a day.
We are talking about a matter 20 to 30 seconds here.
Oh, I thought OOP just forgot to place a comma:
“First of all, the speed of light is 1, dumbass.”
Stubborn as a mule is mentioned in Psalms and Proverbs, so there is precedent.
in retrospect, it’s perfect for that.
Cause God is American! He don’t need no metric shit!
Because we tried to make the meter one 40-millionth of the earths circumference, failed, and ended up at a 299792458th of the distance light travels in a 60th of a 60th of a 24th of the time earth doesn’t take to make a full rotation.
This one’s on us
Well, in our defense, we’re very small.
Ent verified, ent approved
Having said that, we’re pretty lucky that using those pretty arbitrary values we ended up with a speed that you can approximate as 300 million m/s and be off by less than 0.1%.
My understanding is that the person proposing the meter’s distance immediately caught their mistake but didn’t bring it up because they didn’t want people to think the system was flawed, not so much that the measurement was off.
At least one second has a simple origin, and totally wasn’t back-defined in 1967
oh wait
The current and formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is more precise:
The second […] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium (Cs) frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the Cs-133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit hertz, which is equal to s−1.[1]
How fast is a dumbass?
Not as fast as 2 dumbass
1c
How fast can you throw?
The speed of light is a tautology. We define it via how many meters light travels in a second. And we define the meter by the same measure. It’s just the distance light travels in 1⁄299792458 Of a second.
c is a measurable constant, not some unit that is arbitrarily defined. Like Boltzmann’s Constant, or the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the Cesium-133 atom… it just… Is.
Therefore, it is a useful tool to define units. You claim it is a tautology because we write it in units of meters per second, while the meter is defined based on c. This is easily disproven, as you can represent the speed of light in any unit of velocity. It is a fundamental constant, derivable through experiment without any units a priori.
Ergo, it is 1
dumbass
1 c, yeah.
It’s not about the units i used. It’s about using something to define itself. The same problem happens when you use c to define empty space since empty space can define c.
Once you decide which units are used in maxwells equations then the electromagnetic permeability and permissivity pops out as a proportions of c.
Read more Feynman if you don’t believe me.
That may be, and I’ve been meaning to dig into my copy of the Lectures, but that’s moving the goalposts. You said that it was a tautology because it was defined by the meter, and the meter was defined on it. That statement is demonstrably false.
Everything in physics is defined by relative properties. Scale all fundamental units by the same factor and we can not detect any change in behavior whatsoever
I used the meter because that’s generally what is used for measurement in scientific endeavors. There was no goal post moving if the statement applies for all SI measurements.
Literally the entire point of the comment that you’re responding to is that it isn’t true for the metre, and it isn’t true for any SI units.
Your entire claim of tautology rests on the assertion that the speed of light is defined by something external to light itself. That’s false. It remains false irrespective of which SI measurements you swap in.
Just because the speed of light can be expressed in terms of SI units, doesn’t mean its definition depends on them. Which is the point that wolframhydroxide was making.
This directly disproves your original assertion of tautology.
Every metric of speed of light is necessarily relative to other things. Even if you define as 1, now you must be able to know what one unit of time is relative to one unit of distance, and if you do not know that then you do not know that your speed of 1 means.
All fundamental units are defined relative to each other in physics, and all other units are defined relative to the fundamental units.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit
But isn’t the measurement of the speed of light our own proportion derived from the constant that is 1g of water at 1ATM?
It’s not useful to tell somebody it is constant without a way to make use of it. Without knowing how it’s defined relative to other things we can’t use it.
The thing about all the absolute physical constants is that they are almost all based on units defined relative to other things. Unitless constants (defined only as a ratio) are extremely rare (like the fine structure constant) - but even then you have to make up units to measure them (although you can still agree on unitless values with somebody else who chose different base units for measurements).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_physical_constant
I was unaware that the person to whom I was replying, who claimed to be intimately familiar with the complete works of Feynman, needed instruction in how to “make use of” a fundamental constant of nature. If that is something you think is necessary, perhaps you should see to their instruction in such matters, as you are so confident in your faculties of condescending instruction.
Furthermore, I am acutely aware of the existence and nature of dimensionless constants, thank you very much.
The two constants - the speed at which light moves, and the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of cesium - can be combined to define every measurement of time, length, and velocity. They are the constants by which everything else is defined.
Throw in mass, which is easy - a certain number of atoms of a specific element will also have a universally constant mass. Combine it with the other two constants and you have force, energy, and work, and voila, you can describe nearly everything in classic physics.
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club lol
It’s so meta, even this acronym
a second is defined as the time it takes for a caesium atom to oscillate exactly 9192631770 times, at least according to the SI. a meter is then defined, as you said, as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 seconds, which corresponds to some large number of oscillations of those caesium atoms. these numbers are pretty much arbitrary though, we just picked them to match our previous, less precise, definitions of meters and seconds. but using oscillations of caesium atoms and speeds of light in your is completely equivalent to using meters and seconds, except that the latter units are more familiar to us
This got me thinking if we defined the metre to be a more round number, like 1⁄300000000.
It would shrink the metre by 0.6918mm.
Now I’m curious about what implications that would have.
π would be equal 3. /s
Seriously, any metric unit of a quantity involving the dimension “length” would also change its value slightly.
π doesn’t have the dimension “length”, it’s a dimensionless scalar
I know. I should indicate that with “/s” to make that clear. The “also” refers to anything involving “length” besides the metre itself.
:)
But we defined what a meter was long before we knew the speed of light
The small thing defines the big thing that defines the small thing that defines…
1 dumbass per… hour? Minute? Second? 🤷♂️
What are you, my 9th grade algebra teacher? GOSH!
It’s already the right unit. Like a watt is a joule/s
That /s had me looking for the joke for like 10 seconds
1 dumbass per idiot
That doesn’t sound very fast at all…
well, light isn’t very fast compared to the imaginary sky daddy
So, 1
Universal refresh rate.
The human eye can’t see over 1.
It’s deeper than that as we have instruments to measure things we can’t personally perceive.
From everything we know it’s quite literally the limit the universe can update. For the photon moving at light speed time quite literally doesn’t exist. When you look up at the stars, for the photons hitting your eye balls their experience is that creation to reception is instantaneous. The millions or billions of years we perceive it traveled doesn’t exist at that speed.
I just think that’s neat.
That’s beautifully written. I like the idea that I receive cute lil interstellar photons. The stochastic nature of the universe means I am being irradiated by an interstellar object thousands of years away. They started a journey from a star thousands of years ago, crossed the vast expanse of space without hitting anything, pierced our planet’s atmosphere as our planet and system hurtle through space, and was then absorbed by a single cone cell in my eye. It almost feels unbelievable.
For the simulation.
A mile is 0.000000000000**1701** light years. How d’you like them Kaferian apples?
God uses imperial measures. Because of course he does.
What does God need with a starship that uses metric?
Uhh, Jim. I don’t think…
He has no problem doing conversions, like anyone after about 1976 (this is when calculators became ubiquitous, and long before even Britain fully adopted metric, as they still haven’t today - just go watch any British TV show).
I’m a dumbass? I’m not the one deciding all speed should be scaled to a fraction of the fastest thing that exists, dipshit.
I mean, it’s better than trying to scale it to a fraction of the slowest thing that exists…
I didn’t know a dumbass was a unit of velocity…
Ahh, good ole’ 1.
Why is it 1 then?
There’s a convention in theoretical physics to adopt so-called “natural” units. In the natural system of units, measures of length, time, and mass are chosen so as to make the speed of light and the gravitational constant 1. Or sometimes it’s the speed of light and Planck’s constant.
Anyhow, this makes the resulting measures of length, time, and mass completely nonsensical to any human scale problem. But it makes physics equations much shorter to write down, because you can drop all of the c’s, G’s, and h-bars and whatnot.
For example, the famous E = m c^2 becomes E = m. Energy is mass. Voila.
Explains perfectly well how I can eat a hot dog and then go do some things.
Also explains that after I do some things, I need to take a shit.
Don’t correct me, you all know I’m right and fifteen percent of you are currently on the toilet.
15% seems VERY low
Beat me to it!
One Planck Length per Planck Second.
Speed of light is infinite.
The speed of light being finite has been settled for three centuries.
Wrong if you’re a photon. No time will pass as you cross the universe
Dividing by zero equals undefined, not infinite.
They are all wrong
No they’re not
Agree to disagree.
No
Open your mind!
Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
That would mean it’s everywhere all at once which is frowned upon and leads to salamander babies.
:) As long as it’s not matter babies.
What’s a light year?
A day without booze?
