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The Speed of Light is NOT Fundamental. But THIS is. Teacherflix 1 Views • 7 months ago

This is my journey to find all of the fundamental constants of nature which took some surprising turns. Check out Brilliant who sponsored part of this video: https://brilliant.org/dos

When you learn physics, you very quickly encounter the physical constants of nature, things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light in a vacuum, planck's constant, the elementary charge things like that. These are numbers which we believe are the same everywhere in the universe, for all time. They are baked into our laws of physics and are very special, because if they were even a few percent different, then the Universe wouldn’t exist and neither would we. They are also fundamental because we can’t derive them from any underlying theory, we just have to take them as being true.

So I wanted to go on a quest to find all of the fundamental physical constants and collect them all together so you can see them all in one place, because that’s the kind of thing I do on this channel. So this video is the story of me doing that. But it took some fascinating twists and turns along the way, and the final set was definitely not what I was expecting, because it doesn’t actually include the ones we are familiar with, the ones I just mentioned: speed of light, gravitational constant, planck’s constant. Watch to find out why.

--- Links to source material ----
How many fundamental constants are there? By John Baez
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html
Note that his final set is a little different to mine which is explained in his article. I chose my set to be the easiest to understand.
Here are the actual numbers for all these dimensionless constants from David Black
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants_table.pdf

How fundamental are the fundamental constants?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.2040.pdf

Dimensionless constants and cosmological measurements
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.0577.pdf

How do neutrinos get their mass?
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/how-do-neutrinos-get-their-mass#:~:text=Trillions%20of%20neutrinos%20pass%20harmlessly,with%20any%20matter%20at%20all.&text=Neutrinos%20are%20a%20type%20of,interactions%20with%20the%20Higgs%20boson

Helpful wikipedia pages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....Dimensionless_physic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....Fine-structure_const

#physics #quantum #DomainOfScience

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