Is there a unit for the distance light travels in a Plank time?
Fictional
Submitted 5 months ago by NichEherVielleicht@feddit.org to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/0a529044-c9e6-4acd-a774-e00d799df750.jpeg
Comments
bufalo1973@piefed.social 5 months ago
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Yes, the Planck length
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
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: Image
NichEherVielleicht@feddit.org 5 months ago
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Sorry, your reply is still hosted on the feddit.org instance, it’s still unavailable to me :(
icelimit@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Insert Einstein quote about stupidity
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Then what is 2?
Frenchgeek@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Speed of stupidity.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
dukatos@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Because the CPU runs at 300GHz.
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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
MrConfusion@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
You seems 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.
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
AlexCory21@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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 screenshot of the night sky. Stars that tend to be brighter and bluer 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 faster or slower 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. ;-)
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 5 months ago
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.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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?
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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. 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.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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?
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
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.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
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 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
reddifuge@lemmy.world 5 months ago
God has no place in science.
mere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
pls lighten up, it’s not that serious
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This is Lemmy, baby! Nothing is too stupid to break down and ultimately ruin!!!
reddifuge@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Bless you
Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 months ago
He’s a computer scientist. Light is either on or off; 1 or 0.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
But it has fractions, so its float.
Danitos@reddthat.com 5 months ago
It’s a meme.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
God has no place in science.
Thank god someone finally said this.
reddifuge@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Lol
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
If it turned out they exited, wouldn’t you want to study them?
beemikeoak@lemmynsfw.com 5 months ago
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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.
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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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boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
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.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 5 months ago
1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We’ll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Nah, C is C. Who cares about the current hot measurements of space and time on a little rock, outside of us?
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Is it “dumbass” (a single word) or is it “dumb/ass” (relation)?
nexguy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
So dumb/ass = c
Multiply both sides by ass.
Dumb = c*ass
Hmmmmmmmm
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
thewebroach@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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
icelimit@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
1 Meter = x umthilions plancs. There, retrospectively defined. In that sense.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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.
Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 5 months ago
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.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.
Windex007@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
AoxoMoxoA@lemmy.world 5 months ago
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
Typhoon@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Also “in a vacuum” would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Except all the gases and dust. What we know as space vacuum is not empty. Go to a great void for real vacuum.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
petersr@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
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.
gloktawasright@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You might enjoy the book Project Hail Mary if you haven’t read it!
TheFogan@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
VoterFrog@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Hopefully they’d come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
MasterOKhan@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
4am@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
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.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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
SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Speed of light in vacuum is c. So, 1 c = 1 dumbass
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 5 months ago
Speed of light in a true vacuum.
Speed of light through any non-vacuum decreases.
The speed of causality remains the same.
tetris11@feddit.uk 5 months ago
is the speed of causality tied to speed of light in a vacuum, or independent of it?
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
There are various systems of units where select physical constants are set to 1. A handy comparison chart is on Wikipedia: 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)
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I like the Stoney Units, I feel appreciated.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
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?
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I understand nothing I’ve just read but I’m glad you science folk have fun and funding.
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
There is no god
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
And the location of this “Shire” is most improbable!
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Username checks out.
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
This reads like a “do your own research” type of person commented it.
RQG@lemmy.world 5 months ago
dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
solomonschuler@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
“I was wondering where the units went” noted: c = 1 dumbass ≈ 3 * 10^8 m/s
fargeol@lemmy.world 5 months ago
“Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?”
Acamon@lemmy.world 5 months 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!
EldenLord@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Physicists all around would start crying, that’s for sure