Sniffnoy comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong

23 Post author: multifoliaterose 19 August 2010 10:47PM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 24 August 2010 12:05:52AM 1 point [-]

Nitpick: c is a dimensioned quantity, so changes in it aren't necessarily meaningful.

Comment author: WrongBot 24 August 2010 01:17:27AM 1 point [-]

*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.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 24 August 2010 02:09:46AM 2 points [-]

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.