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Science

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Jim__

(14,531 posts)
Tue Dec 17, 2024, 07:30 PM Dec 17

Study claims all observables in nature can be measured with a single constant: The second [View all]

From phys.org


The figure illustrates three events in Minkowski spacetime. Event 𝐵 is neither in the past nor in the future of 𝐴, 𝐴 ~ 𝐵, and event 𝐶 is neither in the past nor in the future of 𝐵, 𝐵 ~ 𝐶. Despite this, 𝐶 ∻ 𝐴. Indeed, 𝐶 is in the future of 𝐴: 𝐶 ≻ 𝐴. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71907-0
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A group of Brazilian researchers has presented an innovative proposal to resolve a decades-old debate among theoretical physicists: How many fundamental constants are needed to describe the observable universe? Here, the term "fundamental constants" refers to the basic standards needed to measure everything.

The study is published - (open source - Jim) in the journal Scientific Reports.

The group argues that the number of fundamental constants depends on the type of space-time in which the theories are formulated; and that in a relativistic space-time, this number can be reduced to a single constant, which is used to define the standard of time. The study is an original contribution to the controversy sparked in 2002 by a famous article by Michael Duff, Lev Okun and Gabriele Veneziano published - (open source - Jim) in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The whole story had begun ten years earlier, in the summer of 1992, when the three scientists met on the terrace of the cafeteria at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. During an informal conversation, they discovered that they disagreed on the number of fundamental constants.

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