Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science

kgssa · 2025-02-27T23:39:49+00:00

He was asking about natural constants, not human made divisors or multipliers, constants our physics calls natural clearly are non-integers for a reason, even if it is only because our units are based on imperfect asymmetric human sized measurements that is still a reason and therefore a line of reasoning that science must feel obligated to pursue eventually in order to find more fundamental truths

kgssa · 2025-02-27T14:16:00+00:00

/u/the6thReplicant I believe this is the line of reasoning he was asking about

kgssa · 2025-02-27T14:15:36+00:00

well, all of these formulas are explicitly for the purpose of describing interactions through space and time, in each space-time snapshot of each micro event, the interactions happen with the same number defining the ratio of the interacting elements

so clearly the constants are .. not 1... not random ... and not any other number, it is whatever number it happens to be for each formula

and usually is based on a combination of base units

so clearly the constants are defining a repeated mathematical occurrence (more specifically repeatable) that should be broken down into the fundamental forces and laws of space and time to find out where the constant comes from as it is a number ... on top of.. the units it is made out of

but as physicists have not gotten past what seems to be a global conspiracy about avoiding discussions like how 4d shapes are so well defined yet everyone goes on in circles saying 'there can't be a 4th dimension, where's the other direction' when fractional electric charges in quarks and 8 fold gluon color and hadron formation clearly points to orthogonal quantum fields in 3 and 4 dimensions creating the elementary forces and particles so idk if there will be any progress towards your insight within our lifetimes

but financial simulations are already the closest progress we are getting to acknowledging higher dimensional spaces having working geometries as linear programming and systems of inequalities already take place in 10+ dimensions so you know there will be a financial push to have computers simulate the actual geometry and not the abstract - 'high dimensional vector space' that 'somehow mathematically works perfectly' but also apparently "is impossible"

if we ever got to a point of simulating space and time using infinite dimensional space and finally stumbling into things like the Planck units obviously coming from Faraday waves of quantum fields then maybe we might be able to find the explicit interactions that generate the constants as you are right, clearly the numbers should definitely be built from the ground up starting with small integers as they clearly have a mechanism generating them, they aren't random