1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We’ll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
Fictional
Submitted 13 hours ago by NichEherVielleicht@feddit.org to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/0a529044-c9e6-4acd-a774-e00d799df750.jpeg
Comments
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 9 hours ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 hours 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.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Is it “dumbass” (a single word) or is it “dumb/ass” (relation)?
nexguy@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
So dumb/ass = c
Multiply both sides by ass.
Dumb = c*ass
Hmmmmmmmm
thewebroach@lemmy.world 11 hours 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
4am@lemmy.zip 11 hours 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 10 hours 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
icelimit@lemmy.ml 4 hours 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.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 minutes ago
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 3 hours ago
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.
Typhoon@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
Also “in a vacuum” would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 hours 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.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 hours 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.
MasterOKhan@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
TheFogan@programming.dev 4 hours 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 9 hours ago
Hopefully they’d come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
petersr@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
Windex007@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
AoxoMoxoA@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours 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)
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I understand nothing I’ve just read but I’m glad you science folk have fun and funding.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 10 hours ago
Fun yes.
Funding? What’s that?
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
I like the Stoney Units, I feel appreciated.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours 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?
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
A quick glance at the summary table can answer that. Planck units seem to do the trick.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 3 hours 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 3 minutes 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 2 hours 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.
Acamon@lemmy.world 13 hours 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!
jumperalex@lemmy.world 13 hours 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.
verdare@piefed.blahaj.zone 13 hours 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.
marcos@lemmy.world 12 hours 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.
shneancy@lemmy.world 12 hours 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])
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Math isn’t arbitrary. Otherwise there wouldn’t be constant debate about whether it’s a human creation or fundamental to any existence.
anzo@programming.dev 11 hours ago
fwiw, engineers round Pi and are fine with it…
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 8 hours 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.
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 12 hours ago
In many advanced physics fields, they use an arbitrary unit system in which c=1, making equations easier to write down. E=m
Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 hours 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.)
turdas@suppo.fi 12 hours 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.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
That’s pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale
Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 hours 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.
unrealMinotaur@sh.itjust.works 8 hours 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.)
Asetru@feddit.org 9 hours 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.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours 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.
ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
The common octopus can grow anywhere from 1 to 1.3 meter
that is not arbitrary at all!
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 12 hours 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)
cynar@lemmy.world 9 hours 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’.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
The speed of light is one lightyear per year
Kornblumenratte@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Only problem – which year? They’ve got different lengths.
Kornblumenratte@feddit.org 9 hours 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.
absentbird@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Just use meters and round up to 300 million m/s for the speed of light.
null@piefed.nullspace.lol 12 hours ago
A Lightyear?
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Year is an incredibly arbitrary length
MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 12 hours 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?
Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 hours 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).
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 11 hours 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 10 hours ago
is the speed of causality tied to speed of light in a vacuum, or independent of it?
Ephera@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
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.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 hours ago
Speed of Causality is the absolute maximum speed. Speed of Light in a (perfect) vacuum happens to be equal to the Speed of Causality.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 10 hours ago
Independent.
reddifuge@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
God has no place in science.
mere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
pls lighten up, it’s not that serious
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
There is no god
fargeol@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
“Okay, but why the fine-structure constant?”
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 12 hours 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.
SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Speed of light in vacuum is c. So, 1 c = 1 dumbass
RQG@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
And as we know, dumbasses are quick.
Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Nothing travels faster than stupidity.