Re:Why scientists are redefining the kilogram
by fixermark on Thursday October 26, 2017 @10:36AM
(#15559148)
Yep. Too far down this road, and you arrive at Wolfram's observation that, hypothetically, the entire universe could be a simulation running as a cellular automaton with a single updating agent stepping the state of the universe interaction-by-interaction. It could take an arbitrarily-long time to run one "step" of the universe in that agent's timeframe, and life existing in that universe would have no way of knowing, because all of our processes for measuring time await the touch of that updating agent to progress.
> If the measurements used to define these constants are defined in terms of the constants themselves, how would we see change?
Either the constants change such that we can measure the effect (e.g. the mass of atoms changes but the calibration of scales does not change accordingly), or they change such that our measurement apparatuses are equally affected. In the latter case, we will not be able to see the change, but then again, you could go into epistemology and argue that nothing has happened at all.