dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
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
Leave at least half of that ass at home if you’re going to drive ma’am
It works as a metric thing: “54 nD in a 46nD zone”.
(nano Dumbass)It was my understanding that dumbass is an imperial unit.
God would use SI units.
I wholeheartedly agree.
“I was wondering where the units went” noted: c = 1 dumbass ≈ 3 * 10^8 m/s
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
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.
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
There’s a Family Guy episode referencing that.
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.
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
Hopefully they’d come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
Every base is base 10 dumdum
0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21…
e: starting at 0 to not shame programmers.
That’s true. It should really be referenced by the number before 10 (e.g. Base 9 for 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10).
Woah, I had never considered that. To think, all these years I was on the side of “initial index is 1.” I’ve unknowingly been using “initial index is 0,” since I started using numbers.
oh-my-god-i-get-it-now.jpeg
IMO it should be called “base 9+1”. It is a “base 10” system because each order of magnitude is 10x as big as the previous one. But, the key thing is to know which digit is the last one before you roll over.
Is your issue with metric, or with the fact that everything in life uses a base 10 (which should really be called a base 9+1) system?
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.
Base 10 is also cultural. Babylon used 60, ancient Egypt had 12 (they counted on the bones in their fingers), Rome had 5, and my wife just spent 10 minutes arguing for 8
What were digits 10 to 59 like in Babylonian?
All maths is done in base 10.
Because of Al-Kwarazimi. Hindu-Arabic math is base 10 and Al-Kwarazimi developed a really good method for doing math as well as inventing algebra. Base 10 spread with his methods. It looks like the Chinese were also using base 10 as far back as during the Shang dynasty. Meanwhile Europeans and their cultural descendants still use base 5 for ceremonial purposes (yes, even in MMXXV)
As an engineer life would be easier if we all thought in base 12, for my wife as a computer scientist life would be easier if it was in 2^n. 10 is a really convenient sized number for arithmetic and algebra though. Babylon was insane i genuinely can’t imagine trying to teach children the name and order of 60 digits to the point of instinctive mathematical understanding
No no, ALL MATHS is done in base 10.
K
You might enjoy the book Project Hail Mary if you haven’t read it!
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.
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.
What’s more profound is that math is universal - after some teething pains with regards to understanding conventions, any alien technology should be comprehensive by us, and vice versa.
“Wait you all started with base 60 and left it? It took us millenia to realize that it was the best choice, and once we did we never looked back”
I think 840 is a better base number. It has 32 factors which is itself a power of 2. That is a highly versatile counting system if you ask me. But you didn’t so I apologize for asserting so.
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
What about imperial system?
/hj
IIRC it’s currently defined based on SI units.
An inch is just a special term for 2.54cm used by Americans (but not our government)
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.
Also “in a vacuum” would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
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.
Ah so THAT’S the resolution to the false vacuum hypothesis
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
Remember that light in motion is electric and magnetic fields pushing and pulling each other along. Why that speed? Because it takes time for an electric field to create a magnetic field and vice versa
Our equations for EM waves (Maxwell’s equations) predict light speed, and the same equations would predict c in any system, so long as reasonable values for the variables are known in that system
So 300 000 000 m/s isn’t going to be a reasonable approximation of the speed of light in vacuum, but any alien that one about radio would probably have Maxwell’s equations under some other name
1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We’ll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
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.
Dumbassion pilot wave theory
Dumbassions Creed
Dumbassions Creed 2: The Curse of Jackie’s Gold Tooth
Is it “dumbass” (a single word) or is it “dumb/ass” (relation)?
So dumb/ass = c
Multiply both sides by ass.
Dumb = c*ass
Hmmmmmmmm
Fucking knew it, Cassandra!
MOISTURISE ME!
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)
I understand nothing I’ve just read but I’m glad you science folk have fun and funding.
Fun yes.
Funding? What’s that?
Come on, you are able to analize words! Fun is obviously fun, and ding is obviously an abbreviation for dingbats, so fun-ding is having fun with dingbats!
Come on, you are able to analize words!
No, you can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. I did everything I could to analyze this topic. There are many things that are possible to analize. Many household items. But not words.
That sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams book.
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?
A quick glance at the summary table can answer that. Planck units seem to do the trick.
They call him Maxxie! Maxxie! Faster than lightning. No one you see / is measureier than he!
I like the Stoney Units, I feel appreciated.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Why use a ratio of the length of the Earth? Why not the Moon? Or the Sun? Or Mars?
Because people weren’t traveling around the moon, mars, or the sun back then, they were traveling around the earth :V
Ah, so it is arbitrarily human experience that defines these things, I see.
Yeah, in history we’ve really been ignoring the experiences of the sunwalkers, but thankfully society is leaving those prejudices in the past now.
It’s all arbitrary one way or another, but the meter was (seemingly) chosen for a specific purpose, creating a unit based on a good and verifiable frame of reference (though probably not as absolute as people thought back then), while also having 1 meter be a convenient and useful measure on a human scale.
It’s all arbitrary one way or another,
Exactly, yes.
Not arbitrary, pretty close to 1/40000 the N-S circumference of the earth
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])
Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.
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
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.
The round number would still be arbitrary, no? It’s roundness would be based on the base 10 counting system, which is also arbitrary.
Not arbitrary. Base 10 because we usually have 10 fingers and those are useful for learning counting. If you have to choose a base, 10 is a good option for humans.
That’s still an arbitrary number to pick, and the choice of cesium oscillation seems pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.
fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it…
To be fair, literally everyone rounds pi, since it’s transcendental.
Math isn’t arbitrary. Otherwise there wouldn’t be constant debate about whether it’s a human creation or fundamental to any existence.
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
The operations and concepts they represent exist with or without humans.
they do indeed, and us humans invented ways to describe them with maths
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
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
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.
That’s pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale
Everything is pretty arbitrary on a universal scale. Except the speed of light. Which is really fucking slow on a universal scale too.
But not arbitrarily.
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.
In many advanced physics fields, they use an arbitrary unit system in which c=1, making equations easier to write down. E=m
The common octopus can grow anywhere from 1 to 1.3 meter
that is not arbitrary at all!
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
https://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.
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.
ok, go measure it then dumbass
welllll i say that’s a reaaaly sketchy and irrational way to look at things.
Okay? You be you, I guess. I mean, stupid physicist eggheads, what do they know?
i don’t like trusting “experts” in fact. trusting “experts” is how we got into this mess. people let themselves be manipulated by the media. people need to think for themselves. yes, that includes not believing certain scientific results, but IMO it’s better to discard a scientific result that i cannot follow myself instead of becoming an authoritarian (i.e. one who believes in authors, i.e. other people’s writing) dependent.
Aaaahhhhh, you’re one of those… Good to know. Yeah, your reply makes sense then. Also thanks for telling me early in the discussion that you’re just a science denialist, then we don’t need to waste precious time with a discussion about things that you’ll just disregard at will anyway.
We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.
Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.
100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1’.
The speed of light is one lightyear per year
Only problem – which year? They’ve got different lengths.
In radio electronics we abbreviate c to 300 000km/s (when working in kHz, different multipliers in other bands for easy maths). The number as it is is round enough when rounded to the whole hundred million for practical purposes with commodity hardware
We could redefine the metre to be 1.00069229…x it’s current size (increase it by 0.69229…mm) to make the speed of light exactly 300 000 000ms-1. This would also change area and volume, and any other units that are derived from length
Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.
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.
See natural unit systems.
A Lightyear?
Year is an incredibly arbitrary length
Years measure time, not distance
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 timeframe as reference.
Speed = Distance over time.
There are no measurements of speed that won’t face that problem.
All lengths are arbitrary.
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?
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.
Speed of light in a true vacuum.
Speed of light through any non-vacuum decreases.
The speed of causality remains the same.
is the speed of causality tied to speed of light in a vacuum, or independent of it?
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.
If you consider light in motion as a wave (as it is in EM models and I think also in current mainstream physics) then you can’t expect it to work like matter. The speed of light is the speed at which EM waves propagate. Causality is the same because many interactions are mediated by exchange of photons via EM waves.
The speed of light in aluminium is ~0.95c, the EM waves in an aluminium antenna aren’t going to interact outside the aluminium faster than 0.95c. I would bet the effective speed of causality would never be greater than the speed of light in whatever medium the light is in
I’m no expert. I probably know too little about the propagation speed of a wave to understand what you mean there.
But here is a scenario where something is faster than light in the given medium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
As I understand, neutrons and gravitational waves are also bound by the speed of causality, because they have no mass. And I believe, unlike light, they are unaffected by electromagnetic forces that a material exerts, so they would presumably (always?) travel faster than light in that medium.
I will also say, that from what little I understand of this video: https://www.pbs.org/video/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-light/
…it sounds like trying to determine the speed of causality by measuring it, is kind of backwards. You’re at best experimentally confirming what has to be a given under our laws of physics.If the photons were travelling faster than the local speed of light, why would light be emitted? The Cherenkov radiation takes away the excess energy as the light is immediately slowed as it moves from whatever radioactive metal to water
Gravity waves are indeed different. I don’t know the maths of relativity, but I bet those equations also require specific wave speeds. They don’t care about matter aside from it’s gravity which can bend space-time and change the wave path
I think we’re pushing this beyond both our understanding
Measuring causality/c despite those being given by our maths refines our values for the various constants
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.
Is the speed of causation propagation linked to plank length?
Yes, it’s derived from 4 physical constants including c
Independent.
Because the CPU runs at 300GHz.
There is no god
God has no place in science.
God has no place in science.
Thank god someone finally said this.
Lol
pls lighten up, it’s not that serious
Bless you
*lightens up*
This is Lemmy, baby! Nothing is too stupid to break down and ultimately ruin!!!
If it turned out they exited, wouldn’t you want to study them?
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.
I suspect what they actually meant is “I’m so edgy. Look at me. I’m so smart.”, but that’s just me.
-
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.
The premise of the meme being discussed sorta is that God exists and can be asked questions.
-
Sure, but there’s no indication any gods do exist, so what’s your point?
The premise of the meme is that God exists and can be asked questions.
He’s a computer scientist. Light is either on or off; 1 or 0.
It’s a meme.
Can somebody reupload the image at a non-feddit.org host? Feddit is incredibly annoying in that it geoblocks most of Asia.
–
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:
Sorry, your reply is still hosted on the feddit.org instance, it’s still unavailable to me :(
Man: why is the speed of light that?
God: what
Man: the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second… why?
God: first of all, the speed of light is 1 dumbass
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?
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.
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
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.
Is there a unit for the distance light travels in a Plank time?
Yes, the Planck length
“Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?”
Then what is 2?
Speed of stupidity.
