Reposting bc I dun goofed before
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
850 points (95.3% liked)
memes
10428 readers
2406 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is the shortest measurable amount of time it's possible to measure with the physics of our universe arbitrary?
It's arbitrary in the same way measuring the time between photon absorption/emission in a cesium atom is arbitrary or the rotation of our planet is arbitrary.
Picking the smallest is arbitrary just like picking a larger interval.
In the cesium clock case, you count 9192631770 because it's close to 1 second we already are familiar with and arbitrarily say 9192631770 transitions is defined as 1 second.
For example Planck time is defined as 5.391247(60)×10−44 seconds. But what is that second? It's the arbitrary 9192631770 cesium transitions we picked because it's close to the second that come from Earth's spin.
Planck time doesn't appear to be arbitrary, but a feature of our universe, hence the shortest measurable unit of time. It's length in seconds is arbitrary because seconds are arbitrary. And seconds are arbitrary because the only non-arbitrary unit of time we have found so far is too unwieldy to use for anything but scientific purposes, and it's very unwieldy for many of those.