What measurement is doing.

J. Rogers, SE Ohio

How measurement works.

When you measure an apple, you are not finding the property of mass in the apple. 
You are finding the relationship between an apple and the kg standard as a middleman.

But the kg is completely arbitrary, it is meaningless to the universe.
So we have to find the standards relationship to the natural ratios of the universe. 

That is what the Planck units are, they are not a unit chart.
They are a bridge between natural ratios and a single physical scale of the unified universe. 

natural ratio = apple in kg / m_P  in kg is not profound statement.
It just removes the arbitrary middleman we put between us and the universe.

The standard framework says measurement is reading off a property the thing possesses.

The apple has mass. The scale reveals it. The number you get — 0.3 kg — is a fact about the apple. The kg is just the agreed language we use to express that fact. The constant G is a fact about gravity. c is a fact about light. These are properties of nature, discovered by experiment.

This description says measurement is inserting an arbitrary middleman between yourself and the physics and reading the ratio.

The apple has no kg. It has a relationship to the universe. The number 0.3 kg is a fact about the apple-to-cylinder ratio, not the apple. The kg is not agreed language — it is a third object we interposed. G and c are not facts about gravity or light — they are facts about how badly our seconds and kilograms are miscalibrated relative to the universe's natural ratios.

The difference is ontological. In the standard framework the universe has properties. In your framework the universe has relationships, and measurement is us inserting ourselves into those relationships with an arbitrary reference object and reading the resulting ratio.

The standard framework then cannot explain why the constants have the values they do — they are just mysterious numbers nature chose. This framework explains exactly why they have those values — they encode where our arbitrary middlemen sit relative to the single natural scale. There is nothing mysterious. The mystery was always just the middleman we forgot we inserted.

The standard framework has been enormously productive precisely because you do not need to understand what measurement is to use it correctly. The three-step process works whether or not you know that is what you are doing. That is why the misunderstanding survived this long.

Measurement is not reading off a property the apple owns. Measurement is a comparison where you interpose an arbitrary reference—the cylinder, the meter stick, the clock—as an intermediary between yourself and the physics. You take the apple's relationships and express them as a ratio against this middleman.

The result is not a fact about the apple or the universe. It is a fact about the ratio between the apple and your intermediary. This measurement hides the real physics—the apple's relationship to the entire universe—by wrapping it inside your arbitrary choice of reference. We cannot see the underlying truth because it is buried inside the ratio between the apple and your cylinder.

To get back to the real physics, you must divide out this intermediary scaling, canceling your arbitrary reference. What remains—the natural ratio with no reference, no unit, and no middleman—is the actual fact.  The natural ratio is true no matter what size an intermediary you choose as a middleman. 

The universe does not measure itself because it has no cylinders; it has direct relationships without being compared to a random thing we humans picked. We need the intermediary because we are inside the universe trying to count relationships we are made of, using references we invented to do the counting.  We have to find something to start comparing things.  But the mistake is in reifying your arbitrary unit scales.

This is what the constants are doing. They are the mechanism that cancels out your arbitrary unit scales within the formula to allow you to compare the natural ratios directly. Once that underlying relationship is established, they scale the result back to the specific output units you have chosen. They take out the intermediary, perform the physical relationshiop to find the natural ratio. then interpose the intermediary back in to return to the unit chart. 

Measurement is the act of inserting an arbitrary reference between yourself and the physics. The number you get is the real physics multiplied by your intermediary. The constants in every equation are simply the arbitrary references that never got divided back out. 

The 2019 redefinition of the SI system is the institutional confirmation of exactly this. Before 2019, the kilogram was defined by the physical platinum cylinder in the vault outside Paris — an explicit intermediary, a literal object we voted on. In 2019 the cylinder was retired. The kilogram, the meter, and the second were redefined by fixing the numerical values of h, c, and k_B to exact values by international agreement. This sounds like anchoring the constants of nature. What it actually did was anchor the intermediaries directly. By fixing h to an exact number, we fixed m_P — the Planck mass scaling — which now defines the kilogram. By fixing c, we fixed l_P relative to t_P, defining the meter. By fixing the second we fixed t_P si time scaling. The platinum cylinder did not disappear. It was replaced by the constants themselves, finally acknowledged in the only role they ever actually played: as the numerical definitions of our arbitrary references. We did not say that is what we were doing. But operationally, we retired the physical cylinder and promoted the constants to take its place — confirming that the constants were always just the intermediary unit scaling, expressed as numbers.