Timeline for Why isn't it $E \approx 27.642 \times mc^2$?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| S May 17, 2014 at 0:53 | history | suggested | senshin | CC BY-SA 3.0 | improve formatting |
| May 17, 2014 at 0:12 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S May 17, 2014 at 0:53 | |||||
| May 16, 2014 at 20:28 | comment | added | Rijul Gupta | @rob : does that mean you disagree with my justification, or were you the one who retrieved the down vote? | |
| May 16, 2014 at 20:09 | comment | added | rob♦ | @rijulgupta I have elaborated in another answer. I highly recommend you follow the first link in that answer, to Wigner's famous essay. badroit's question has some real philosophical meat to it. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 19:45 | comment | added | Rijul Gupta | I would criticise your downvotes because you have simply downvoted because I did not give dimensionless constants! When carl talks about the fudge factor, it may be dimensionless but it is no less meaningful than the ones I gave! Moreover the question is clearly about encountering more constants than numbers in equation as one could have written the numerical value for "c" and easily lose the beauty of the eqn, even though the number would have meaning and dimension both! If you find my reasoning justified, I would ask you to retrieve your downvotes. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 19:31 | comment | added | rob♦ | I downvoted because I thought the answer missed the point of the question. Both of your examples are dimensionful quantities which have lots of digits for historical reasons. While the Rydberg factor was initially an empirical constant, modern theory gives us $R = m_e c \alpha^2/2h$, a product of several meaningful experimental quantities and a rational number. No hard feelings, I hope. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 18:55 | comment | added | John Alexiou | -1 because the example R has units, and thus not an ugly number but a meaningful quantity. The poster is asking about coefficients without units like $F = 2.39872 m a$. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 18:49 | history | edited | Rijul Gupta | CC BY-SA 3.0 | added 390 characters in body |
| May 16, 2014 at 18:40 | comment | added | badroit | Thanks! Indeed there are formulas with weird physical constants but the fact that there's so many without is really interesting to me ... and it' an interesting point about what is the difference between beautiful numbers (1, 2, $\pi$) and ugly ones ... perhaps it's a question of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". | |
| May 16, 2014 at 18:06 | comment | added | Rijul Gupta | Will the downvoter be kind enough to explain what problem he/she had with the answer? | |
| May 16, 2014 at 13:37 | history | edited | Rijul Gupta | CC BY-SA 3.0 | added 367 characters in body |
| May 16, 2014 at 5:04 | history | answered | Rijul Gupta | CC BY-SA 3.0 |