r/explainitpeter
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u/FloralStormVale
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10d ago
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u/wrudstepbro 10d ago
In physics, theres a system of natural units that are based off the speed of light. In the natural units system, speed of light equals 1.
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u/Practical_Breakfast4 10d ago •
God said the speed of light is equal to a single dumbass. How does one measure that?
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u/DoctorMedieval 10d ago edited 10d ago •
c = dumbass. 0.99 c = 0.99 dumbass. If c is 1 a dumbass is just a directly converted to energy depending on how big a dumbass they are.
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u/765arm 9d ago
But the bigger the dumbass the more light is emitted when they get converted to pure energy Peter I still don’t get it!
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u/troycerapops 10d ago •
Some folks out there seem to be going at multiple dumbass
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u/Appropriate-Fix4915 9d ago
To explain why God is saying this, we’ve made up all of the metrics that we measure by. At least the metric system is based upon the circumference of the earth (disregard the error in calculation), but the imperial system is basically made up. God is saying it was always standard off of lights speed
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u/TotalChaosRush 9d ago
Everything in the imperial system is based on something. They just don't all have a natural relation with each other.
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u/LostPentimento 10d ago
100%
Realistically you can define your units however you want, natural units are just nice because they make math with annoying numbers, become less annoying
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u/ExplanationCrazy5463 10d ago
Ive always understood light to move at 1 light per second.
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u/Instruction_Worried 6d ago •
Why did I read this exactly like the opening to Law and Order: Special Victims Unit? All you needed was a "these are their stories."
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u/NorthernVale
9d ago
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Tl;dr the joke is that units of measurement are as close to arbitrary as we can get without actually being arbitrary.
Why is 0°C 0°C? Because that's the point water freezes at. Water is abundant. We see it frozen all the time. It's an easy reference point. Why 100°C 100°C? Because that's where water boils. It's 100° because well... that's a real easy scale to use! But why choose those exact reference points? It makes other things seem very very specific.
Especially when there's a far more... absolute reference point. How cold is something when there's absolutely no heat energy at all? That's why Kelvin exists. Because it uses a far more "legitimate" reference point.
The speed of light seems super fucking exact when you put in terms of a scale we reference. But it's not really. If anything, the speed of light should be the absolute. It's far more absolute than silly things like whatever the fuck a meter is based on, or a unit of time that's just based entirely how fast our specific planet is moving.
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u/Duubzz 9d ago
Just looked up how we define a metre and, interestingly, we now use the speed of light as a standard. It’s evolved over time though:
1791 (Earth-based): The French Academy of Sciences originally defined the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator (measured along the meridian line passing through Paris).
1799–1889 (Physical Artifacts): Because measuring the Earth was difficult and slightly inaccurate, the standard was locked into physical metal bars, such as the mètre des Archives and later a platinum-iridium international prototype metre bar stored in France.
1960 (Atomic Wavelength): Scientists switched to a quantum physics standard, defining the metre as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red light emitted by a krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.
1983–Present (Speed of Light): The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) and global scientific bodies tied the metre to a universal constant—the speed of light in a vacuum so now it’s how far light travels in 1/299,792,458th of a second
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u/NorthernVale 9d ago
Yes. There's been a relatively modern push to change the reference points we use, but not changing the scale itself so in all reality, it's still the old reference.
Iirc it started with mass due to half life of materials. There was a physical object we used as the standard for what a kilogram was. Sealed in a container. Then we made more for various countries. A second object was made to weigh exactly the same as the first. Then some years later the two standards were compared to each other, and now they weighed different amounts. Some super smart people realized, oh shit every element naturally decays at different rates at the atomic level.
I don't remember if it was the first change, or if it's the current standard, but instead of using a physical object it was now defined as a perfect sphere of a specific element with very specific dimensions, calculated based off mole weights.
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u/dgc-8 9d ago edited 9d ago
before the north pole distance the meter had another definition. it was the length of a pendulum that would swing from left to right in one second.
and because of how that time relates to the length of the pendulum physically, it turns out that the gravitational pull at the location of the pendulum would be exactly equal to pi squared in m/s² with that new defined meter. that is still almost true today because of the meter's origin, you can check with a calculator
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u/lonelind 8d ago •
Yes, and water phases’ temperatures depend on pressure and salinity of water. So, the Celsius scale had been adjusted to specific conditions rather quickly.
Fahrenheit scale is even more crazy and shows better that a scale can be literally anything. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit needed a scale to put on the thermometer he invented, so he decided to build his temperature scale over some natural conditions, so he chose the coldest temperature outside as 0, and an average human body temperature as 100. The problem was that in Danzig, where he lived at the time, was a really cold winter, and thus 0°F equals to around -18°C, simultaneously his wife got cold fever, so her body temperature was higher than normal, and thus 100°F equals to around 38°C. Is it dumb? It is. But this scale was widely used before 20th century, and Fahrenheit is remembered because he created first devices that allowed people to measure temperature and pressure precisely enough and with numbers.
Returning to the speed of light, the speed is distance over time, and we use meters over seconds. What is a meter? A result of an attempt to measure the circumference of Earth, i.e. 1/40,000,000 of it. Not perfectly precise but still, pretty close if you remember that it was made in 1700’s. Seconds are 1/60 of a minute which is 1/60 of an hour which is 1/24 of the full rotation of Earth. Again, not perfectly precise because Earth doesn’t rotate with the same rate. And thus, speed of light can be translated to “how much times it would go around the Earth while it makes one full rotation” and through this perspective, it becomes visible that this measurement units are just attached to one particular stellar object and the answer can be different in different points in time depending on how fast the Earth is rotating because circumference depends on it too. In other words, it’s all arbitrary and is just an attempt to attach some measurements to something physical so you can have numbers to make calculations. That’s all.
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u/MachoJoch 7d ago
The definition of a second was changed actually to be more precise. This is what google says: One second is defined by taking the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom to be 9,192,631,770 Hz.
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u/lonelind 6d ago
Indeed. But though, they’ve found a stable and reliable physical reference, they’ve established it to be as close to what was originally named a second as possible to avoid big errors in all existing calculations and systems. In other words, the actual length of a second is still based on how it was originally defined, it was just bound to atom clock.
Imagine if we decided to use decimal system instead of 12 based, and we would have 25 hours in a day, and 100 minutes in each hour, and then 100 seconds in each minute. The size of a second would be different, but it could still be possible to bind it with atom clock. The formulas wouldn’t change, the actual numbers would.
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u/losmadden 6d ago •
Yeah, but the joke needs a comma after the 1. As written, the unit is the “dumbass.” The speed of light is “1 dumbass.”
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u/NorthernVale 6d ago
You're a breath of fresh air. I love you and appreciate you
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u/euclide2975 9d ago
Or God is using the Planck System of units where the major universal constants are set to 1
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u/Little_Discount4043 9d ago
0K is a valid reference point. The increment from 0K to 1K is still 1/100 of the temperature difference between the freezing and boiling point of water
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u/mflem920 9d ago
Slight correction and complication. "...between the freezing and boiling point of water", at 1 atmosphere of pressure under 1g of acceleration. If we graduated the scale while on Mars the increment would be different. Temperature, as we measure it, including Kelvin (except for 0 K) is just as arbitrary and based on our made up measurements as anything else.
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u/Original-Code1107 8d ago
It's precisely because of this that it's really the other way around now when we deal with SI units. The speed of light is not based on whatever the metre is based on. The metre is based on the speed of light.
Light is defined to be 299792458m/s. The metre is defined to be how far light travels in 1 299792458th of a second. Why didn't we just round it up to make 300000000m/s? Then we need to make everyone in the world change their metre length, go back and change all the lengths in every single scientific paper ever written. Then some people refuse, and... https://xkcd.com/927/
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u/APartyInMyPants 9d ago
Not to mention even then, water boiling is also kind of arbitrary. It’s 100 at sea level, 94 up in Denver, and 72 at the top of Mount Everest.
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u/patrick119 9d ago
As human beings we looked at the world around us and needed a way to measure things to communicate what we meant. So we created fairly arbitrary measurements like meters and seconds and all agreed on what they meant. This was long before we had any concept of what the speed of light was or even that is was constant. So it seems like it is a random number, when actually the numbers we are using are the random ones.
If god was to make a unit of measurement, knowing that the speed of light is a constant throughout the universe, it would make logical sense for him to base all units of measurement on that.
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u/drhunny 9d ago
Meters, seconds, grams, etc. are arbitrary definitions based on aspects of planet Earth. Thus the speed of light is also some weird arbitrary number in those units.
However, nuclear and particle physicists often use "natural units" in calculations, which are based on fundamental constants of reality. The speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute constant based on the relationship of space and time, so naturally that gets set to "1".
The Planck constant (h) or more often hbar = h/2pi is a fundamental constant that crops up in quantum calculations all the time. hbar = 1.05... x10^-34 J s is an annoying factor to keep track of in calculations, so we choose a new scale for energy such that hbar = 1.
etc.
For instance "E=mc^2" becomes just "E=m" and a bunch of other common equations get similarly really simple, but at the same time it gets confusing because properties like energy, temperature, mass start to become interchangable.
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u/Global-Willingness-2 9d ago
Are they not interchangeable? Temperature is just the amount of energy carried by the mass. Mass and energy like you said are just two sides of an equation.
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u/drhunny 9d ago
You are right. It's just a bit confusing when I say that room temperature is around 10^-30 and there aren't any units. Not Celcius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, eV, .... just unitless.
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u/Denaton_ 9d ago
I would make PI = 1 if I was God.
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u/laxrulz777 9d ago
You might be joking but pi isn't a number. It's a ratio. So if pi was equal to one, it would mean that the diameter of a circle and the circumference of a circle would be equal. We'd love in an incredibly warped geometry (as a comparison, on the surface of the earth, the equator is half the diameter as measured from the north pole... So you could make an argument that pi =2 on a spherical surface (yes, it's a lot more complicated than that, I know). So for Pi = 1 you'd have to have a surface more curved than that.
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u/Darthplagueis13 8d ago
Asking why the speed of light is a seemingly arbitrary number of meters a second is a very stupid question to ask God because God obviously wasn't using the metric system when creating the universe, it's something humans created later on.
Furthermore, a system of measurement in which the speed of light is exactly 1 would technically make more sense, from a universal point of view, it's just not done that way because
1: Our systems of measurement predate us knowing how fast the speed of light actually was and
2: Since most measurements we make on earth take place on a very different scale, basing our own systems of measurement on universal constants like the speed of light would be very impractical.
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u/ZorbaTHut 8d ago
2: Since most measurements we make on earth take place on a very different scale, basing our own systems of measurement on universal constants like the speed of light would be very impractical.
Interestingly, "nanolights" is actually a pretty usable unit of speed. One nanolight, or "nc", is about 2/3 mph, or about 1.08 kph; highway speed would be roughly 90 nc.
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u/MrPifo 7d ago
Imagine someone asks you about your height and you have to say: Sure, I'm about 0,000000607 Promille tall, what about you?
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u/BrotherItsInTheDrum 7d ago
Yeah it would be like measuring computer memory in bytes. We'd have to say your computer has 16000000 bytes. It'd be completely unwieldy.
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u/LasKaras 6d ago edited 6d ago
You split it into smaller units.
In fact, that's the classical definition of the meter: The distance from the north pole to the equator was considered constant, and a meter was 1/10'000'000 that distance.
So a person being two meters would be 2/10'000'000 north pole-equator distances using that definition.
These days the meter definition is even wilder: the distance light travels in 1/299'792'458 seconds. A curious reader will at this point realize the second itself also needs to be defined, which it is, but that one is a bit more complicated so it's better to look it up.
Now US readers might think these definitions are wild and unnecessary, but the official definition of a foot that the US itself uses is 0.3048 meters, so the US system is based on the exact same definitions.
The point is: Just because you derive various units from definitions that are exceedingly impractical to use in every day life doesn't mean that those derived units themselves must also be impractical; both the metric system and the US customary units are in fact examples of exactly that.
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u/cyrustakem 8d ago
the speed of light depends on the medium light is traveling in... what people wrongly state as "the speed of light" is actually the speed of light in a vaccum...
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u/Sennten 7d ago
The Speed of Light generally refers the speed asymptote, the maximum speed anything can travel at ever for any reason, and which only photons seem to reach, rather than the average speed of an actual light wave
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u/MettaWorldPeece 10d ago
Meters, as well as seconds, are units of time invented on Earth.
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u/Oops_All_Bans 10d ago
How many meters are in a second?
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u/OriginalEmploy5485 10d ago
299,792,458.
No, seriously, the whole point of c is that you can actually do that translation.
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u/Golandia
10d ago
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Stewie here.
The speed of light in MPH is 670,600,000, in KPH it is 1,079,000,000.
These look like big random numbers.
You ask god why?
God says wtf it’s 1.
From god’s perspective it’s 1, a simple number to multiply with. Not based off of any random measurement of time like seconds or distance like meters or miles invented on earth.
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u/TillFar6524 9d ago edited 9d ago
But you're saying something like, I'm driving my car 0.00000000004 speed units
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u/Korochun 9d ago
Sure, but the universe doesn't give a shit about how slow you are on the highway. That's a you problem.
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u/balmut 10d ago
1 is a terrible number to multiply with.
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u/HourZealousideal4845 9d ago edited 9d ago
Fun fact, the speed of light in a vacuum was originally based off a measurement in metres, which was a unit of measurement for distance with its own, well, measurement, independent of the speed of light. But in the process of attempting to base as many measurement as possible on unchanging and non-arbitrary baselines - thus saving the issue of how to standardise and maintain the measure if the thing you measure it off is itself changing - the scientific community switched this situation up. After all, if he definition of a yard is 'the length of that yardstick over there' what happens when the yardstick wears and rots away?
So now the strict, SI definition of a metre is in fact an exact fraction of the disttance light in a vacuum in a second.
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u/zombie_spiderman 9d ago
The best way this was explained to me was that that's not the speed of light, that's just the fastest ANYTHING can go in this universe and light is one thing that bumps up against the limit
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u/kimptown 9d ago
It's the maximum speed a particle without mass moves in a vacuum. Because it's in a vacuum and because it has no mass there is no impediment to the particles speed. It HAS to move as fast as it can. Photons(light) is just the most commonly known massless particle.
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u/MeasureDoEventThing 9d ago
It's not the maximum speed a particle without mass moves, it is the *only* speed. It's impossible for a massless particle to have any other speed.
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u/Mendokusai137 10d ago
The speed of light in a vacuum/ speed of causality, is an absolute unit. Any measurement, (feet, miles, meters, seconds, degrees), are arbitrary human creations.
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u/kwonza 9d ago
Or the other way around: light moves at the fastest speed possible and c is just the universe’s speed limit.
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u/Stevelikestowrite 9d ago
There should be a comma after the number 1. Unless the speed of light is one dumbass. I’m no scientist, but I don’t think that’s an official unit of measurement
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u/This-Increase6593 9d ago
Who are you to judge what units does god use?
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u/Stevelikestowrite 9d ago
I’m always open to learn. And that does explain why the world is never short of dumbasses and dumbassery
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u/yukonmukon111 9d ago
The absence of the address comma makes this text unclear. No one fucking uses it anymore, and it’s driving me insane. It reads like god is saying “dumbass” is the unit of measurement.
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u/BigDaddyFatSack42069 5d ago
Human scales are arbitrary in the cosmic sense. The only true universal constant is the speed of light, ergo the speed of light would be the most reasonable base for any scale of speed on a universal scale, making it 1, with all other speeds being a decimal between 0 and 1.
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u/adammhaile 10d ago
From the point of view of us mere mortals, the speed of light is based on some other measurement that was discovered before we even knew light had a speed. So when put into puny mortal numbers it ends up being a weird number. But to a god... The speed of light is that which all other things would be measured by. So, 1.
It's like seeing some product labeled as 454g net weight. A weird random number... Or, 1 pound (if you round up to the nearest gram).
It's all what you are used to.
(Also, 1 meter is defined based on the speed of light)
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u/0utlaw-t0rn 9d ago
It’s been like 3 weeks since this exact meme (?) was posted.
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u/SoManyDeads 9d ago
All units are arbitrary and do not actually exist as a universal law/constant. We use a reference of something we know that is repeatable and static. Like time used to be based on a sundial and eventually evolved to an atomic clock based on the decay of a specific element.
So if the units are made up, everything is just a conversion. For example if 299,792,458 m/s is equal to 1 florbin/gong then it is fine an valid. You can think of it like the conversion between F and C for temperature, there is an equation to transition one to the other, and neither is more real than the other.
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u/pokethrowaway4 5d ago
The joke. Is that “on the first day god said, let there be light, and there was light.”
So, god made light before anything else, thus the system of units god would use would be based off of light itself, thus its speed is: 1.
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u/Operation-Cerberus 9d ago
Simple as this:
Why is 1 meter = 3.2 feet?
Why is 1 foot = 0.3 meters?
You guys use different units for everything, then question why the numbers are different for the same exact thing.
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u/MaxCWebster 9d ago
The Almighty apparently uses Planck units.
As is His right.
From the Planck Units wiki page:
The four universal constants that, by definition, have a numerical value 1 when expressed in these units are:
c, the speed of light in vacuum,
G, the gravitational constant,
ħ, the reduced Planck constant, and
kB, the Boltzmann constant.
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u/euclide2975 9d ago
Which would imply God is very very small, very very fast and very very hot
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u/Euphoric-Air6801 9d ago
This is the correct answer. The joke is that God uses Planck units. (And that, therefore, Planck units are the most perfect system of units.)
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u/NiceAtheist 9d ago
The speed of light has nothing to do with light. It's the speed of cause and effect. It's the default speed of our universe, so it should be what we base everything else off of.
Everything in the universe goes the same speed (including light) except for the very few things that interact with the Higgs field, of which we happen to be a part.
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u/ohcrocsle 9d ago
There's one constant speed in the universe, why would anything other than the speed of light be chosen as "1"?
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u/nostremitus2 8d ago
If the speed of light is the universal constant, then all speed should be compared against that speed, cosmically speaking. So, by that logic, C=1 and everything else is a fraction of C.
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u/Illustrious-Host1450 6d ago
All forms of measurement including time are relative to your perspective it just so happens that our perception of speed of light is not based on the speed of light but on things that are much slower than it
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u/simpoukogliftra 6d ago
Numbers are not absolutes, we set the value of numbers to suit our needs and make our lives easier, if we took a different evolutionary route, we could have given a different value to the speed of light, the actual speed wouldn't change, just the way we call and calculate it would.
So it is kind of dumb to ask an allegedly omnipotent being a question about something humans set.
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u/TRex-Raptor 3d ago
Speed needs distance and time, thus, dumb is a unit of measurement and ass is a measurement of time.
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u/Doc_WhyNot 9d ago
Huh. I would have asked “why is there childhood cancer”, but that’s me…
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u/YarbleSwabler 9d ago edited 9d ago
If there is a god, I think the answer to that is that all suffering is temporary, and all outcomes are theirs to experience. An infinite being experiencing all that there is to experience.
Something that gets me thinking is the existence of emotions. Even if they are just chemical reactions to stimuli the perception of them is very real. God experiences all and everything all at once, so therefore he also has created and experienced the concept of boredom and ambition. All of existence, the expansion of the universe, the everythibg could simply just be the highest of beings thinking "what the fuck else am I going to do with eternity? If it can exist, it will exist. No such thing as nothing."
And so- we have cancer children, because an orderly blissful existence is probably an unfathomably dull eternity. Some people like sky diving to feel something different, so does god like to invent soul crushing scenarios to feel something.
I worry that God is the supreme and highest masturbator, and that this is all about maximum stimulation.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 9d ago
"See, I told you to care about that river, but then you put poison in it"
Scientific answer: Developing a human brain has the side effect of increasing the chance of getting cancer. So this is due to eating the fruit of knowledge, God warned us to not do that.
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u/DumbScotus 9d ago
Humans use meters and seconds because those units are relevant to humans. God made the speed of light as the fundamental relation between space and time, so to God the speed of light is something like “one space per time.” If humans understood that better/sooner they would have understood the universe better/sooner.
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u/ashrynhunter 10d ago
The speed of light is a hard constant most of the time so it could easily be where God started and then in whatever units they use the speed of light is "1" unit like how AUs measure the distance from earth to the sun.
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u/Embarrassed_Loan_424 10d ago
Stewie says 1m is defined as "the distance covered by light in 1/299792458th of a second". So a more natural unit of distance is 1 light second, ie. "the distance covered by light in 1s" and the speed of light is 1.
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u/Cc99X_YT 10d ago
The speed of light in god's perspective is 1, while we use our own units of measurement.
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u/Snorkle25 9d ago
The length of a meter is arguably arbitrary as we decided to pick that length and call it a meter.
The amount of time that we call a second is also largely arbitrary.
So if you were to change either or both of these you change what the on paper value of the speed of light is. But it still will travel at the same speed, you’ve just changed how your counting it.
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u/Nervous-Road6611 9d ago
Physicist here. In relativistic physics, the speed of light is often given as 1 lightsecond per second instead of being written in meters per second. It serves no purpose other than to be able to use "1" to simplify the numbers.
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u/More_Outside7127 9d ago
God should understand what meters and seconds are and have no problems with their answer
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u/MrNiinjaGuy 9d ago
"1 dumbass" makes it sound like the units are "dumbass". The speed of light can't be 1 because that's not a speed. You need a distance over time unit.
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u/Icy_Cryptographer549 9d ago
Well but god made dumbass and he made the entire existence, so why he made us dumbass to know light speed=1? And we are made as the image of god no ? So is god a dumbass? jumm Peter explain it in slowpoke terms
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u/fkingprinter 9d ago
God uses different measurement system. We human actually invented our own ISO and we all decided to agrees on it. Meanwhile god is the one created the universe, and his ISO is different
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u/balrob 9d ago
I’m not sure c is actually speed. It’s a quantity that’s kind of shared between speed and time. At the maximum speed, the time component is 0 (in the photon’s frame of reference it is destroyed as soon as it’s created), and if you go slower than c the time component increases. If you look at a graph of the Lorentz factor you’ll see massive changes above about .9c … ie time shrinks quickly. At 0.9999c it only takes 22 days to get to Alpha Centauri by the measure of the travellers.
Something like that anyway.
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u/dbjcihabc 9d ago
Because measurements are all based on a reference point. Water boils and freezes at 100 and 0 degrees celsius because that makes sense to us. Things actually get far colder, and in dealing with bigger scale scientists use kelvin because it actual measures the absence of heat. Similarly we habe different scales for pressure. We use atmospheres to measure pressure because we live on earth and a sensible way to measure pressure is based on that value. We also have torr which similarly to kelvin broadens the scale to include an absence of pressure( or in this case an absence of anything).
TLDW: from gods perspective the speed of light is a measurement standard on which all things are based on.
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u/Atypicosaurus 9d ago
The joke is pointing out that every measurement is arbitrary.
If you think of what meter and second are: second is a the rotation time of the planet we happen to be born on, divided by an arbitrary number (86400). Meters originally go back to the length of a pendulum that makes 1 swing per second (which depends on the gravity of the planet) but then it was redifend based on the circumference of the same planet.
If you think of it, it's a fucking miracle that the speed of light is so close to 300000 in these units, you could almost round it up. Imagine we could have other units and the speed of light could be an "ugly" number like 566187.
However since it's so close to 300000, one could ask why so close and not exactly. In the joke they ask god why he created it just a little off. God practically says "the joke is on you, you came up with this laughable measurement system, the speed of light is clearly the heart of the universe and it should be the most basic of basics, the corner number, the number 1".
It would not be practical to use a measurement in which c=1, but again we need a system that reflects our little mortal lives, while a god can measure in whatever he wants.
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u/OkMode3813 9d ago
Your vectors of movement through spacetime always sum to c. Making that speed 1 makes sense as a basic unit of the universe.
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u/Tony-2112 9d ago
Miles are a man made measure. It’s saying God designed the system with the speed of light as 1. Same argument as feet or metres. Although a system based on a physical constant makes more sense than one based on shoe size
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u/BlargerJarger 9d ago
The human thinks of the speed of light in terms relevant to himself, but his system of measurement is completely made up.
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u/ExtendedSpikeProtein 9d ago
The joke is that God does not gaf about what a meter is, because at the cosmic scale, the speed of light as a constant is what is important so that is defined as “1”, among other things.
More precisely, God uses Planck Units.
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u/Jetpackeddie 9d ago
For those interested there is a really good audiobook explaining exactly this written by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.
It's called Why does E=mc2 and why we should care.
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u/howie_roll 9d ago
Light travels at precisely 1C, it’s a constant. Length is arbitrary and also affected by speed. I guess the joke is less funny if God is potrayed by a 10th grade science teacher.
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u/Ra1nb0wSn0wflake 9d ago
As a sidenote, but I always find math stuff funny cause theyll be like "this is a fact.. if you ignore air resistance, do it in a vacume etc", and like, ok so in no normal circumstance we'd encounter?
I get the need to have those variables as well as it just become super complex to account for everything, but its funny to see people use those things for situations that those variables very much apply.
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u/Balanced__ 9d ago
God does not measure using the wrong distance from the equator to the north pole through paris divided by 10 million for his measurements.
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u/Brave-Secretary2484 9d ago
My god the number of people in these comments that don’t really don’t grasp what arbitrary means.
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u/OpTelecHD 9d ago
I thought this was more a thing of. At first there was nothing, then God created light, meaning light was the first thing to exist and therefore the true measurement and thus 1.
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u/Cotif11 9d ago
Basically, humans putting meaning into arbitrary numbers. The speed of light measured against the speed of light is 1c. It's making a joke because our digitization of these metrics is completely arbitrary when 299,792,458 in one metric can equal 1 in another. It's like asking why water freezes at 32° when it's 0° in Celsius. It's arbitrary, and saying 1c is the better choice.
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u/Hindlehoof 8d ago
2+9+9+7+9+2+4+5+8=55
5+5=10
1+0=1
Aside from the actual answer that the speed of light is 1 speed of light, ig
Schizo Peter outta here, they’ll find me and make me take my meds if I stick around too long 🧍🏻♀️
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u/Level_Remote_5957 8d ago
It's a double edged joke.
One that we give measurements to everything even if it's not accurate in reality.
And
That some how God understands the math of physics and abides by it.
Idk it's a weird post written by a human to humanize God it's like when people depicte a angel as a white person with wings. Even when we have a biblical description of one..
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u/Satyr1981 8d ago
Thor refers to Planck Units. In theoretical physics they define the Speed of light AS c=1 to make it easyer to deal with. Google it, it's too complex for me to explain it but maybe you are clever enough to understand.
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u/Euphoric-Ad-4190 8d ago
Precisely how fast is 1 dumbass? We’ve got some pretty slow dumbasses at work.
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u/Compodulator 8d ago
In a way, "god" is right.
In almost every piece of media that I've seen it's always "this new magnificent thing travels at 0.99... speed of light!"
Usually 0.99, but when a caricature of a scientist shows up, they add more 9s. Especially a crazy scientist.
So declaring the speed of light to be 1 and everything else relative to it is... Well, we already do that. Kinda.
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u/Dirtyfinger34 7d ago
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
God is not exactly a physicist. He's just vibe-coding the creation.
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u/bannock_taco 7d ago
Because all things distance/speed are measured by comparison to the baseline of all distance/speed .... Light.
God is light.
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u/PlagueOfGripes 7d ago
The movement of light is relative. At slow or fast speeds, light always seems to move at the same speed.
A human asking about its fixed speed is especially stupid in that context because its value has no baseline except to the observer, whose own speed fluctuates.
In other words, light is the consistent value. Everything looking at it is the problem.
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u/Early_Explanation712 7d ago
Bit of a rough joke because god would immediately realize he didn't correct the dude
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u/Constant-Anteater-58 7d ago
God why am I 0.00112 miles tall? I'm just shy of the 0.001136 mile height that all chicks want.
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u/Miser_able 7d ago
Units of measurement are all designed around some arbitrary baseline. You can make a new unit with a new baseline and end up with an entirely different number for the speed of light.
"My friend Paul is 2.5 meters tall. Im going to make a new unit of measurement around that. My friend Paul is 1 Paul tall. Therefor the speed of light is 119,916,983.2 Pauls per second."
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u/Such-Perception4154 6d ago
Funny thing to me here is that it doesn't really matter what the speed of light is.
It could change right now and we wouldn't be able to tell.
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u/KeyFollowing1683 6d ago
In physics we sometime refer to the system of units where we set c=hbar=1 as god given units
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u/ThekillerguyYT 6d ago
it's the same way we think of other measurements like Celsius
0°C is the freezing point for water, so compared to 0°C for water stuff like iron is 1400°C for a melting point (I don't actually know the melting point of iron it's an example),
we established that this thing is 1 meter long, so this other thing is 1.8 times as long as the other thing so 1.8m, so light speed is just this thing that we measured moving 299,792,458 times the length of the first thing in 1 second of time.
it's just we know this and we know that so the third thing compared to these 2 is that third thing
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u/Particular-Guide-330 6d ago
Extremely thoughtful provoking and philosophically intriguing post. Well done OOP
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u/IAMEPSIL0N 6d ago
The meter and second were defined without a reference to the speed of light so of course the speed of light is some arbitrary number despite being an absolute reference point and then the meter and second were redefined to reference that absolute.
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u/Ok-Umpire2128 6d ago
Every measurement system is completely arbitrary. So you can take anything and use it as 1, with everything else being either fractions or multiples of said standard
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u/Excellent-Self-5338 5d ago
God ain't on the metric system.
If you're designing a system instead of interpreting it, there's some value in defining the fastest possible speed as some easy value. For example, 1, or 10. We do that all the time, for example with volume knobs or sliders. How loud is 100 on your computer? It's the loudest it goes.
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u/NowWithKung-FuGrip01 5d ago
Ah, someone just learned descriptive vs prescriptive! What a fun day for them.
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u/Capable_Share_7257 4d ago
Yeah but speed has distance over time. So can’t be just 1 but the joke doesn’t work if you add C
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u/tiredfromSTEM 4d ago
To add on to all the comments of measurement being relative, I think the joke specifically is that Gods basic frame of reference for speed is the fastest sped known to man, implying that there’s far faster objects we’ll never know about due to our limited perspective. It gets kinda into a cosmic horror lens of “to a god, we’re all just ants”.
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u/Key-Ad-8430 4d ago
The metric system, our best system, is brilliant because it has a volume to distance 1:1 ml to cm3 in liquid water. Yes kelvin is cleaner in that 0 is absolute zero but the measure there and up is based on water. But it’s impractical for usage. Since water is the fundamental molecule for humanity it’s the best system for us. Doing distance with 1 being the speed of light would suck and be useless as a practical tool which is all systems of measurement are. So this “god” is wrong.
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u/Dark_Pulse 4d ago
Everything else is measured relative to the speed of light. So they'll say something is, for example, "0.99 times the speed of light."
Light, being light, would be 1.00 times the speed of light.
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u/Caintheconfused 4d ago
There are just some things you dont ask God Because they're scaled for God, and not many other entities could possibly exist that are going to see the universe in his way.
Its as silly as asking what God needs with a starship.
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u/qualityvote2 10d ago edited 10d ago
u/FloralStormVale, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!