New Video: Aliens and the SI System of Units
Added 2017-09-30 12:49:55 +0000 UTCIf we wanted to build a teleporter with aliens, how would they know how big a meter is?
Comments
We need an unknown key. That key is the form of communication. How to express concepts. What sences or modes are being used to expess and communicate. Sight, sound, touch, heat, cold, various pressures, smells, intensity, ect. To communicate length scales, time scales, mass scales, gravity scales, entropy scales, electric field scales, magnetic field scales, nuclear force scales, nuclear decay scales, ect. Humanity can't communicate with most other life on this planet, how in our all of our arrogance, can humanity belive we could communicate with life from outside this solar system or galaxy. If the key is found the rest is show and tell. But we may be the one's going to school, not the unknown life form. The CODATA constants are valid for earth under our set of conditions. There's nothing in astronomy, astrophysics, or particle physics that says our constants span the universe. Or for that matter if they are constant over time spans greater than measured quantities over the past 200 to 300 years in a space of 13 billion light years or 93 billion light years. Maybe they do, or maybe they don't we only have data in the EM spectrum and finally with LIGO in the gravitational field. But still measured only from earth. Is a meter on earth the same as near a blackhole? Is a second the same on earth as it is near a blackhole? Is mass equivalent throughout spacetime? Your question is exciting, and a good one to consider! I'm looking forward to learning what your video presents.
Bill Russell
2017-09-30 15:06:01 +0000 UTCYes, and we don't need to use our formal definitions for our SI units for this communication. For instance, we could send a pure sine wave for one second and say, "We call the length of time of that signal a second". Then we could define the meter in terms of the distance between us and alpha centauri (if they don't know how to figure that out, we can explain parallax), and then define a kilogram in terms of the mass of proxima centauri, for instance.
Kevin Iga
2017-09-30 13:36:04 +0000 UTC
