Comment on Fictional
Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 hours agoThat’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.
turdas@suppo.fi 8 hours 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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 hours 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.