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timtyler comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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What physical process would cease to function if you increased c by a billionth of a percent? Or one of the other Planck units? Processes involved in the functioning of both neurons and transistors don't count, because then there's no difference to account for.
Nitpick: c is a dimensioned quantity, so changes in it aren't necessarily meaningful.
*Blink.*
*Reads Wikipedia.*
Would I be correct in thinking that one would need to modify the relationship of c to some other constant (the physics equation that represent some physical law?) for the change to be meaningful? I may be failing to understand the idea of dimension.
Thank you for the excuse to learn more math, by the way.
Yes, you would be correct, at least in terms of our current knowledge.
In fact, it's not that unusual to choose units so that you can set c = 1 (ie, to make it unitless). This way units of time and units of distance are the same kind, velocities are dimensionless geometric quantities, etc...
You might want to think of "c" not so much as a speed as a conversion factor between distance type units and time type units.
That isn't really the idea. It would have to interfere with the development of a baby enough for its brain not to work out properly as an adult, though - I figure.