In the Dark

Two serious questions crossed my mind during Friday’s very interesting talk about the redefinition of SI units. One is that the changeover to the new system takes place on 20th May, which is right in the middle of the examination period at Maynooth University. We will therefore have to supply two differents set of physical constants, one to go with examination papers taken before 20th May and the other for those taken afterwards. This will even affect those of us who like to use natural units in which, for example, Planck’s Constant is set equal to unity: after the redefinition of Planck’s constant on 20th May 2019, we will have to set its value in natural units to be equal to 0.99999999987.

The other question is that the new system of SI units presupposes that the constants of physics are actually constant and can therefore provide a stable framework. Many theories have been suggested in which the fundamental constants change with time. In the present context I feel obliged also to point out as an example the classic paper of Scherrer (2009) (PDF available here) the abstract of which reads:

We examine the time variation of a previously-uninvestigated fundamental dimensionless constant. Constraints are placed on this time variation using historical measurements. A model is presented for the time variation, and it is shown to lead to an accelerated expansion for the universe. Directions for future research are discussed.

This casts grave doubt on the motivation for the new system of SI units, at least until 12 noon.

This entry was posted on April 1, 2019 at 7:38 am and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags April Fool, arXiv:0903.5321, International System of Units, SI Units. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.