Comment by arethuza
14 years ago
Aren't all fundamental physical constants like that - they are essentially meaningless values plugged into theories to make them align with observations?
14 years ago
Aren't all fundamental physical constants like that - they are essentially meaningless values plugged into theories to make them align with observations?
Mostly because we (humans) made up physical units (i.e. meters) while we were inventing physics. There's nothing keeping you from re-deriving physics equations without the messy constants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
Even then there are some dimensionless numbers that you can't get rid of (the ratio between the strength of the gravitational and coulomb forces being one obvious example).
Pi being another.
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Natural units are nice, but they are completely impractical for dealing with normal Mirkowskian space. I.e., how do I explain to someone who cannot view me how tall I am? Our normal unit system is nice because it's phenomenological, and maybe inconvenient.
Agreed, but the universe is under no obligation to express itself in units that are convenient on a human scale. I like to think of this as an anti-anthropomorphic principle.
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yeahbut, some are interrelated. Like the speed of light and the permittivity of freespace (1/c^2 * mu). If you measure that constant and solve back for c, then you better get ~3 * 10^8 m/s.
That's what they look like at present, but it's possible that future theories will allow us to calculate their values from first principles.