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"Arbitrary" ("existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will", "based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" [1]) is a very poor term. Not only is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe, it is also capable of demonstrating (when it is actually the case) equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation. It is not perfect, but can you present anything that does better?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

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freehorse 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe

It is also very highly constrained by how _we_ observe the universe. Beings with different sensory/cognitive capacities could develop very different models.

> equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation

If there was some mathematical equivalence between their models and ours, which is already a leap to assume, there is still a question about whether the specific measure used would be translated to something equivalent to our object length measure in their model, which gets much stronger than just some equivalence assumption. And it’s even stronger to assume that this equivalence could just be inferred without any other information apart from the disk.

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mannykannot 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems disproportionate to fuss about "a leap to assume..." when we are talking about a small plaque affixed to a probe on the highly speculative basis that something intelligent might one day retrieve it, as opposed to something that is mission-critical. Would we be better off for not making these "leaps"?

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freehorse 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I was answering to a specific comment chain.

	▲	mannykannot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It would be a leap to assume another culture has something similar to (or, in some cases, anything resembling) one's ethics, sense of humor or taste in music. In comparison to these things, science has something they do not: apparently universal and impersonal 'laws', which, where we can check, appear to hold across the visible universe (putting aside some unresolved issues on the leading edge of our present knowledge.) For some extra-solar civilization to examine the probe and its plaque intact, it will have to rendezvous with it in space. It seems to me to be the greater leap of faith to suppose this can be done without having knowledge that is isomorphic or equivalent to our formulation of orbital mechanics. Do you have any concrete ideas about how this might be so?