[Physics] Units in Special Relativity

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I have several small questions about units in special relativity:

  1. I've read somewhere that $c=1$ can be interpreted as lightyears being out unit of length, and years being our unit of time. But that would yield to $c=1$ lightyear/year, instead of just a dimensionless $1$. Does this mean that this interpretation is wrong? Otherwise, if I have to assume that $c$ is a dimensionless $1$, I have the following questions…

  2. First, I don't really get why we talk about a $ct$-axis instead of a $t$-axis. Is the reason for this that $c$ is constant, so instead of talking about a $t$-axis, we might as well 'scale it up' with $c$, by means of speech? And does it matter how we set $c$, with or without dimensions? I would guess no, because it doesn't matter if we're dealing with time or space, they seem to be the same, somehow…

  3. I am familiar with the notion of spacetime, but I don't get why we didn't introduce a new unit for the coordinates of events… Spacetime is supposed to be a blend of time and space, so why don't we get rid of both notions in our calculations, and work with a new unit? Or could someone elaborate on a justification why we choose to write time in terms of length?

I'm posting these questions simultaneously, because they overlap a lot.

I do understand snippets, like:

In a Newtonian world, space and time are considered fundamentally different dimensions, that don't interact with each other (they don't have an influence on each other).

However, as we've seen in the Lorentz transformations, the position of a particle in a different reference frame, will also depend on its time in the original reference frame. What we see is that space and time are interwoven, and as they depend on each other, we can express one — in our case $t$ — in terms of the other. I can almost grasp this, but not entirely. Does anyone know an example of a classical situation, where the units on the $x$-axis and $y$-axis are dependent on each other, which makes it possible for us to write the variable on the $y$-asis as a quantity that belongs to the x-axis?

I've written a lot of my thoughts down. I'm not expecting all my questions to be answered, but I'm just hoping that the more I've written, the easier it will be for someone to pinpoint the main problem I'm having, and from there on I will try to continue.

Best Answer

Well I am going to come in here. I have read (and written) a lot around this subject and have pondered it for a long time. I think I can comment both on what I find makes sense, and also on what are the currents of thinking in the physics community.

  1. Is it "$c=1$" or "$c = 1$ distance-unit per time-unit"?

This is a good question and you are right to ask it. There is no consensus on the answer! Some people think that space and time are so alike that it is just bizarre to have different units for them, as it would be to suggest we should measure distance north-south in, say, inches, and distance east-west in metres. So they would say that once we have understood this then the value is $c=1$ and it is dimensionless.

Other people prefer to say that time and space are not quite identical, because, for example, a timelike line cannot be confused for a spacelike line, nor turned into one by Lorentz transformation. Conservation laws, such as conservation of energy and momentum, make a highly insightful appeal to the difference between timelike and spacelike directions. So these people would say that it is useful to adopt units in which the speed of light evaluates to 1 distance-unit per time-unit, and it is not a dimensionless quantity.

The reason that there is not complete consensus is that there is no objective principle which asserts which is the correct or better choice. This is because the use of units in physics is always somewhat subject to human convention. When we say, of a mass for example, "it is 12 kg" then ultimately we are saying that the mass is 12 times larger than some other mass (one we have to define another way, or just resort to pointing to a physical object). I think the concept of physical dimensions is tremendously useful in analysis and in physical understanding, so I would not want to set it aside. For this reason I prefer to say that $c$ (and velocities more generally) are dimensional not dimensionless quantities. If we take light-seconds as our unit of distance, and seconds as our unit of time, then the value of $c$ is one distance-unit per time-unit.

  1. It is convenient to scale the time axis up by a factor which makes the diagram convenient when speeds of order $c$ are involved. I don't mind whether it is called $t$-axis or $ct$-axis; that doesn't matter.

Note that although time and space are parts of a single whole called spacetime, it is not quite right to say they are the same as one another. The future and past lightcone for any event is an objective idea, which separates spacetime into regions timelike-separated from that event, and another region spacelike-separated from it (and the boundary between them which is null). But nor are time and space completely distinct as they are in Newtonian physics.

  1. In special relativity it is convenient, and it makes a lot of sense, to label coordinates in spacetime with values that all have the same physical dimensions. One can choose a temporal value or a spatial one (or some other possibility); it doesn't matter. Spatial ones are the standard choice.

In might interest you to know that in general relativity the mathematical framework adopted at the outset handles issues like this automatically as one "turns the crank" of tensor analysis, and as a result it is quite common to use sets of coordinates which do not all have the same physical dimensions. One could use $t,r,\theta,\phi$ for example. The use of the metric ensures that factors of $c$ are taken care of.

Further remark on units

After an exchange which you can see in the comments, I decided to add another remark. As I have said, the use of units in physics is to some extent a matter of human convention, but clearly some people judge that this does not extend to this issue in relativity, and they want to argue that only one formulation is correct. Here are the two formulations side by side. In the left column is the point of view where $c$ (and speed more generally) is taken as dimensionless. This can be done by reducing the number of physical dimensions employed to do physics. In the right column is the point of view where speed is dimensional.

(ls = light-second, s = second, m = metre) $$ \begin{array}{ll} c=1 & c = 1\; {\rm ls/s} \\ 3 \times 10^8 \,{\rm m} = 1 \,{\rm s} & 3 \times 10^8 \,{\rm m} = 1 \, {\rm ls} \\ 3 \times 10^8 \,{\rm m/s} = 1 & 3 \times 10^8 \,{\rm m/s} = 1 \,{\rm ls/s} \\ E^2 = m^2 + p^2 & E^2 = m^2 + p^2 \mbox{ and see * below} \end{array} $$ (*) In the case of an expression like this, if one thinks of $c$ as dimensional then it might be said to be an abuse of notation to miss out the physical dimensions when substituting the value "$c=1$ speed-unit" into any formula, but this is merely a matter of convention on what the formula means. In either case it has been taken as understood that when evaluating any given expression, units will be adopted in which $c$ has the numerical value of 1.