The Speed of Light is not Fundamental

The Speed of Light is not Fundamental

When you learn #physics, you very quickly encounter the physical constants of nature, things like the #gravitational constant, the speed of light in a vacuum, planck’s constant, the elementary charge things like that. These are numbers which we believe are the same everywhere in the universe, for all time. They are baked into our laws of physics and are very special, because if they were even a few percent different, then the Universe wouldn’t exist and neither would we. They are also fundamental because we can’t derive them from any underlying theory, we just have to take them as being true.

So I wanted to go on a quest to find all of the fundamental physical constants and collect them all together so you can see them all in one place, because that’s the kind of thing I do on this channel. So this video is the story of me doing that. But it took some fascinating twists and turns along the way, and the final set was definitely not what I was expecting, because it doesn’t actually include the ones we are familiar with, the ones I just mentioned: speed of light, gravitational constant, planck’s constant. Watch to find out why.