this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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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!
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])
Math isn't arbitrary. Otherwise there wouldn't be constant debate about whether it's a human creation or fundamental to any existence.
natural laws of the universe can be described with our maths. but i'm pretty sure the universe didn't go "ah yes, 1+2=3 i can work with that! let there be light".
the numbers, the symbols, the equations - they're all human made, an attempt to describe things in a way that can be understood by us. but is this how they are? of course not. no wave or particle would describe itself the way we describe them, in fact they wouldn't describe themselves at all - they simply are
The operations and concepts they represent exist with or without humans.
they do indeed, and us humans invented ways to describe them with maths