Comment by tsimionescu
2 years ago
But does that make any physical sense? All the other speeds we are familiar with would be proportionally slower, since they are all ultimately determined by fractions of the speed of light, right? For example, if the speed of light were 10mph, the speed of sound would be something like 0.6in/h, days would be much, much longer, chemical reactions would take hours etc. Overall, I don't think it would really make any difference for a human in this world: everything would actually be perfectly identical.
I don't know whether it makes physical sense. There are other fundamental constants, too. Changing just "c" might lead to stuff like "atoms can't exist" or "the universe as we understand it would not evolve," etc. Or, not.
Changing "c" is different from just changing your units.
Yes, changing c would definitely lead to stuff like "reality does not exist as we know it".
c goes into many other constants and determines most of the laws, especially in e&m. Realistically, atoms would not be able to hold up against the pressure to collapse, pretty much all matter (if it still existed) would condense to very very very cold solids instantly. We'd be shut out of most light from the sun for potentially hundreds of thousands of years.
I'm just starting my big graduate theoretical physics journey so i really can't do all the relativistic quantum math yet, take what i say with a grain of salt!
AAUI the basic laws can be expressed with dimensionless constants, and in modern physics c is a conversion factor for convenience. I don't know if there's a way to adjust all of the "real" physical constants conjointly which would amount to "just like the Standard Model with a different c".
I want to say it's not incoherent to say e.g. "Newtonian mechanics, but relativistic, with a different c", except of course e.g. Newtonian gravity with its action at a distance doesn't fit, and I wonder if really even contact forces fully work if you try to follow through every detail.
I think the actual answer to your question is that the outcome you're hypothesizing would be absolutely useless for teaching the reader about relativistic effects, so there's no reason for someone to write such a book for a lay audience.
Why would these dependent on the speed of light?
Because the basic understanding of physics is that all particles move at constant speed c in spacetime; the proportion of their speed that is happening in the three spatial dimensions is determined by their mass. So, any particle's speed through space is a fraction of the "speed of light" c; the higher its mass, the lower the fraction.
The other items I mentioned are then caused by the speed of these particles. The speed of sound in a medium is determined by how fast particles collide into other particles in the medium. The speed of the earth around its axis (the length of a day) is determined by the speed of the particles making it up in the warped spacetime of the earth's gravitational field. The speed of chemical reactions is also limited by how fast atoms and electrons move and can interact with each other.
The length of a day, at least, is unrelated. There was a big splash in the news not long ago because it was determined that the length of Earth's day was changing and we might need to change it by a second.
Venus has a much, much slower rotation on its axis, but Mars is almost the same.
2 replies →
I am not a physicist:
I've read that C is really the speed of causality, and that electromagnetic radiation is really a disturbance in the EM field that is propagating along a path. A photon is really information about a prior event, that caused the disturbance i.e. emitted the photon, propagating across the EM field at the rate C. Likewise gravity, the strong force, and the weak force are also propagated at the speed of causality. E.g. if the Sun suddenly doubled in mass for some reason, it wouldn't just take eight minutes for us to see the change in EM radiation, it would also take eight minutes for us to feel the gravitational change.
The whole bit about the physical laws being the same follows from that, and the assumption that there isn't any way to transmit forces across spacetime except through transmission of causality.
[flagged]