The Universe's Secret: We're Speaking Physics with a Thick Accent

 J. Rogers, SE Ohio

Here’s a secret every physicist knows but rarely says out loud: our most fundamental units of measurement are completely arbitrary.

The meter was originally one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The kilogram was the mass of a liter of water. The second is a fraction of a day.

We built our science on a foundation of human-scale conveniences. And we know it.

We nod along when this is pointed out, but we gloss over the most important consequence: If our units are arbitrary, then a huge part of the math in our physics textbooks isn't about the universe—it's about fixing our self-imposed, arbitrary scale.

So, how do we "unarbitrary" the math? The standard model of physics is silent on this. It presents laws filled with mysterious numbers like the speed of light, c, or Planck's constant, h, without explaining that their primary job is to act as universal translators.

The key to unlocking this is a concept from computer science called "Separation of Concerns."

What is "Separation of Concerns"?

Simply put, it's the art of untangling a complex problem by separating it into distinct, non-overlapping issues. You solve each one independently.

Imagine a chef writing a recipe. A bad recipe would mix the ingredients (the "what") with the cooking instructions (the "how") in one messy paragraph. A good recipe separates them: a clean list of ingredients, followed by clear steps. This separation makes the recipe easier to understand, modify, and debug.

Physics has never done this. We have a single, tangled recipe where the genuine laws of the universe are mixed up with the mathematical instructions for converting between our arbitrary measuring cups.

The Three Concerns of Physics

When we look at an equation like the most famous one in the world, E = mc², we are actually looking at three separate concerns mashed into one line.

1. The Concern of Human Measurement (The Arbitrary Chart): This is our world of kilograms, meters, and seconds. We built our rulers and clocks here. It's useful, but it's a distorted map that treats mass, length, and time as fundamentally independent things.

2. The Concern of the "Real" Physics (The Unity Chart): This is the universe's native language. At its most fundamental level, reality seems to work in pure, dimensionless ratios. Concepts like mass, energy, length, and frequency aren't independent; they are deeply intertwined facets of a single thing. The real, fundamental law here isn't E = mc²; it's the simpler, more profound statement: Energy is Mass.

3. The Concern of Translation (The Bridge): This is the "unarbitrary-ing" layer. This is where the physical constants live. They are not fundamental features of the universe. They are the conversion factors, the Jacobians, the bilingual dictionary that translates the simple truth from the Unity Chart into the distorted language of our Arbitrary Chart.

The c² in E = mc² isn't physics. It's linguistics. It's the fixed exchange rate that tells you how many of your arbitrary "energy units" you get for one of your arbitrary "mass units," because in the universe's native language, they are the same currency.

How Separation Makes the Complex Simple

Let's see this separation in action. Look at these four legendary laws:

1. Einstein's Mass-Energy Equivalence: E = mc²

2. Planck's Quantum Law: E = hf

3. Boltzmann's Thermodynamic Law: E = k_BT

4. de Broglie's Wave-Particle Duality: p = h / λ

They look like four different, profound discoveries about different domains of physics. But when we separate the concerns, a stunning pattern emerges.

First, we identify the Real Physics (The Unity Chart):
The fundamental law in the universe's language is a simple equivalence: Energy = Mass = Frequency = Temperature = 1/Length...

It's all the same fundamental "stuff," expressed in different ways.

Now, we identify the Translation (The Bridge):
To express this simple unity on our human chart, we need conversion factors:

• To go from Mass to Energy, use c² (because E_P / m_P = c²).

• To go from Frequency to Energy, use h (because E_P * t_P = h).

• To go from Temperature to Energy, use k_B (because E_P / T_P = k_B).

What looked like four separate discoveries is revealed to be a single, simple truth being projected into our distorted measurement system four different ways.

The complexity wasn't in the physics. The complexity was in our description.

The Takeaway: A Clearer View of Reality

By separating the concerns, we achieve a clarity that is otherwise impossible. We realize that:

• The constants aren't mysterious; they are predictable artifacts of our unit choices.

• The laws aren't independent; they are siblings from the same parent principle.

• The search for "why" changes. We stop asking "Why is c 299,792,458 m/s?" (a question about our map) and start asking "Why is the fine-structure constant 1/137?" (a genuine question about the territory).

The universe is simple and elegant. The complexity we see is the shadow cast by our own arbitrarily-shaped measuring sticks. By learning to separate the concern of translation from the concern of physics, we can finally step out of our own shadow and see the light.