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Writer's pictureterrycornall

Locality v Universal Constant

Updated: Jul 19, 2023

It appears to me that physics has a dilemma. On the one hand we insist that things have to be local (which has a particular technical meaning that I am going to run off and Google. Back in a minnie...) Ah, meaning that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings, according to Wikipedia. (Duh!)

But on the other hand there are all these constants that are apparently non-local, i.e. everywhere has the same value. Isn't a universal constant a contradiction of the requirement of locality?

I'm sure there are all sorts of good explanations for how this is not a contradiction, but nonetheless, I wonder if maybe things like C and G are not so constrained to be constant at all. And if locality is true, how long would it take our neighborhood to find out that some suburb of a far-flung part of the Universe had a different speed-limit?


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