Comment on Fictional

Acamon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• jumperalex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

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  • verdare@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • saltesc@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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      • msage@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Then the devil created Britain.

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    • FinalRemix@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Then it’s lucky the numbers line up as well as they do, no?

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      • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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 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.

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      • Morphit@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        299792458? That’s amazing; I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!

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      • princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Fluff you that made me snort.

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  • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • BakerBagel@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Why use a ratio of the length of the Earth? Why not the Moon? Or the Sun? Or Mars?

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      • kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Because people weren’t traveling around the moon, mars, or the sun back then, they were traveling around the earth :V

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not arbitrary, pretty close to 1/40000 the N-S circumference of the earth

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• shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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  • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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      • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

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  • anzo@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it…

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    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      To be fair, literally everyone rounds pi, since it’s transcendental.

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  • MotoAsh@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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      • MotoAsh@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The operations and concepts they represent exist with or without humans.

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  • Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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• i_love_FFT@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• turdas@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The meter isn’t really arbitrary, even when you ignore the description 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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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale

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    • BC_viper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Everything is pretty arbitrary on a universal scale. Except the speed of light. Which is really fucking slow on a universal scale too.

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      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        But not arbitrarily.

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    • turdas@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • turdas@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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      • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

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• ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The common octopus can grow anywhere from 1 to 1.3 meter

  that is not arbitrary at all!

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• TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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• Asetru@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Asetru@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

      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.

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      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

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• unrealMinotaur@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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• WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The speed of light is one lightyear per year

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  • Kornblumenratte@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Only problem – which year? They’ve got different lengths.

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• cynar@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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• Kornblumenratte@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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• absentbird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.

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• null@piefed.nullspace.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  A Lightyear?

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  • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Year is an incredibly arbitrary length

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    • null@piefed.nullspace.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      All lengths are arbitrary.

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    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Years measure time, not distance

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      • Spectrism@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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 time as reference.

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• MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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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    • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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      • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

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• lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  natural unit systems

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