Wel, the speed of light is defined to be a constant for the purposes of a lot of these equations, in a way not too different from the way the gravitational constant G (representing a coefficient of the force of attraction between two particles) is defined to be 6.67300 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2. It turns out that light doesn’t always travels at 300 million meters per second and that it’s speed is in fact dependent to some degree on the medium through which it is passing (light travels faster in water,) just as quantum theory guarantees us that the fundamental force could not always pull with exactly the same force–that the behavior of particulate matter at the subatomic level is much closer to Brownian motion.
Anyway, the point is that you’re right and definitely onto something here: these sorts of “constants” must certainly be considered to act in many respects like random variables (but to be clear: they are not used AS random variables in relativistic equations. They had to be calculated from physical observation and they are called constants precisely because on average they don’t vary much, and in fact most of the time the swirling infinite Brownian chaos cancels itself out leaving us with a nice clean equation, provided we sweep the mess under the carpet with–yep, you guessed it–a brand new constant!
In fact, you can think of just about any scientific or philosophical system moving forward on similar strategic grounds. We define constants provisionally but also by experience, so that they are not completely by chance and yet not also ordered–a strange non-violent co-existence of the same and the Other, between what we know and the Truth. There is a hyper-productive aspect of thought that has much more to do with a free-flowing dance and epic masterful poetry, or perhaps the austere stern perfection of sculpture, than with the meta-narrative ‘prose’ voice in which scientists so often drone on…
/ sorry, i do go on, don’t i?
It’s a valid point that observation pressuposes light, and is thus dependent on its speed… but our capacity is set WAY below light-speed, man. At most, you’re going to be able to distinguish 25-30 pictures per second as distinct before they start blurring together and appear to move. In other words, our observation is in way more trouble than just not being fast enough to catch light moving. (That’s be wild, though, wouldn’t it?) We do have devices that slow down photons, and can serve them up one at a time.
In fact, this is related to the deeper trouble our observation is in–uncertainty. It seems that the very act of conscious observation alters reality. So there’s no truly objective experiment, not even in theory but according to physical theory. This is because there is a fundamental uncertainty at the basis of the operation consciousness performs in the act of observing something.
It seems that by focusing our attention–or even by not focusing it–we cause matter and energy (same thing) to conform to manner in which we are attending to it: it’s particles if you want particles, it’s waves if you want waves. The problem is, they’re not interchangable: it’s like integrals and derivatives–you can go one way and you get further abstraction and more information about the function/energy-set; you go the other way, you lose particularity and along the way you acquire a ‘generalizing constant’ (back to that, huh? Didn’t even plan it.)
But at any rate, we’re not just imposing these rules to keep the math straight: in a weird way, it’s almost like the universe is imposing these rules on us. I mean, there’s a upper bound on what we can hope to perceive about the universe, even in our best theory, that has nothing to do with our intelligence or our measuring tools. This has to do with an eerie sort of quantum interference which is caused by conscious observation.
The universe just seems to have come built this way: by looking at it, we force waveforms to collapse to particulate networks, exert the force of an irreversible determination without even being aware of it…
