151–160 of 188 posts
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It started with the French. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system The meter was originally based on the measured dimensions of the Earth.
Ah yes, you're right. Another nice coincidence that a seconds pendulum is less than 1% away from 1/10 millionth the distance between the equator and poles.
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The sound pressure wave does take 17 meters in the air to make a full cycle, no ? It’s real, same for the photon
It's not about measuring peak to peak in distance, it's about measuring how long it takes for one spot to encounter second peak after first. The fact that the first peak traveled some distance is irrelevant, as its entirely dependent on propagation speed, which doesn't affect the frequency, only vawelenght.
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Do you think that physics is somehow subjective? We absolutely would have decoded the message.
Physics is a model of reality. Reality is objective, but the model we have chosen is very much "subjective" (maybe arbitrary is a better term). It's easy to imagine that another species might have never conceptualized electrons as little balls orbiting around a nucleus. They are neither balls nor are they flying in circles, those are simply abstractions we like because they appeal to the way we perceive reality. The…
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Unsure what the tone of this message is, so I don't know if you're aware, but that's included too: > Behind the figures of the human beings, the silhouette of the Pioneer spacecraft is shown in the same scale so that the size of the human beings can be deduced by measuring the spacecraft. It's good to have redundancy, not just so someone interpreting the plaque can confirm their hypothesis, but also in case one of th…
I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles. Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements b…
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What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record. Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)
Making the data fault tolerant to the discovery by another civilization, its collapse and later rediscovery by another civilization seems a bit of a stretch goal. :)
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I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles. Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements b…
If we picked up that plaque from space with an illustration of some aliens and an alien solar system and someone Tweeted it, the correct hypothesis for the numbering would develop plurality consensus within one hour. I don't know if aliens would decode it but it's not right that humans wouldn't decode it.
[stub for offtopicness] [come on you guys]
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I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles. Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements b…
What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record. Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)
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It started with the grandfather clock. Everyone's clock pendulum needed to be the same length to have the same length of a second. So a meter also happens to (approximately, this was before we could easily be precise to several decimal places) be the length of pendulum that cycles at 0.5 hz (each swing back and fourth is a second) in 9.8 m/s^2 gravity.
It started with the French. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system The meter was originally based on the measured dimensions of the Earth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles. Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements b…
What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record. Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)