dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
And as we know, dumbasses are quick.
Nothing travels faster than stupidity.
Have we broken the bad news barrier? Science is amazing!
It turns out the bad news particle is composed of one up ass, one strange ass, and one dumboson
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
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.
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.
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
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
What were digits 10 to 59 like in Babylonian?
You might enjoy the book Project Hail Mary if you haven’t read it!
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.
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
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.
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.
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.
fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it…
To be fair, literally everyone rounds pi, since it’s transcendental.
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 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 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.
The speed of light is one lightyear per year
Only problem – which year? They’ve got different lengths.
We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.
Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.
100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1’.
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.
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.)
Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.
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?
The actual answer is
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because the universe had to pick a finite number and it probably doesnt use meters as an internal measurement ruler for scaling so it’s an arbitrary large random number to us.
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Why did it have to pick a finite number? Because it has finite lifespan and resources for actualization. This forces hard speed limit.
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The speed of light has nothing to do with light it’s a shitty name that makes understanding its true nature needlessly complex.
In actuality all massless waves/particles including photons, gravitational waves, and neutrinos will move at the speed of light, because thats as fast as anything massless can go. Its a universal speed limit for any real mass-particle, which is ultimately governed by Planck’s constant and the symmetry preservation of Penrose spacetime diagrams. Its the speed of causality a universal framerate limit that tells us the universe flows/computes through discrete microstates with ultimate precision limit bounds.
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.
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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.
There is no god
And the location of this “Shire” is most improbable!
Why is it improbable?
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
*lightens up*
Bless you
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?
“Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?”
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:
Sorry, your reply is still hosted on the feddit.org instance, it’s still unavailable to me :(
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.
Then what is 2?
Speed of stupidity.
Speed of light in vacuum is c. So, 1 c = 1 dumbass
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.
Username checks out.
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Physicists all around would start crying, that’s for sure
