Natural Units of Measurement

We have been talking about measuring time, marking the passage of years, centuries. Of the millennia of human history. The choice of the Earth’s revolution time around the Sun was clear to us. A year, and we also divide it into days, hours, and seconds. But humanity also measures other things, like lengths, like weights. We use the meter, the kilogram. Sometimes we talk about them together: meter, kilogram, second.

These units of measurement are human, decidedly anthropocentric. It seems easy to understand: a meter is almost the height of a person, a kilogram the weight of four or five apples. And a second is… the second we say to a friend “Just a second”.

But a glance at the cosmos immediately leads us to think of other units of measurement. Of other quantities, to encompass the vastness and smallness of horizons that we do not always appreciate on our planet. Let us think, then, a little bit more, about the Universe.

In the Universe, there are forces that act over very large distances, such as the gravitational force (whose constant is G, Newton’s constant). But there is also a speed that seems insurmountable: the speed of light in a vacuum c. Finally, there is the infinitely small – the one we never think of when we look at the entire Universe. Yet everything depends inextricably on it, because the history of everything is tied to the infinitely small. To quantum mechanics. And therefore to Planck’s constant h, which tells us how the Universe forms structures, “things.” Atoms, molecules, and planets. Stars.

In Oriental parlance, the characteristics of prakrti (nature) are in fact the three gunas: tamas (stillness, inertia, heaviness), rajas (rhythm, speed, change), and sattva (equilibrium, balance). And it almost seems as if this ancient inspiration from the Oriental Shamkya school of philosophy is suggesting that tamas indicates universal gravitation, rajas the speed of light, and sattva the stability of the equilibrium of atoms indicated by Planck’s constant. Just a suggestion, maybe. Or maybe not.

With G, c, and h we could construct a new “system” of units of measurement, a system built from the characteristics of the Universe itself. Because the values ​​of these three constants determine the entire material structure of everything. In a certain sense, using these natural units is like admitting that the Universe already has its own preferred units of measurement and that we humans, with our meters and seconds, seem a bit like guests trying to adapt.

Autori: Marco G. Giammarchi e Roberto Radice