Wouldn't a system based on Planck units be even better?
tobias b koehler
Take a look at speeds - the SI unit would be "m/s" but for most
purposes, the non-SI "km/h" is used. Elsewhere it's "miles/h" or "knots".
But the universe provides us with such a wonderful universal constant
that is the same everywhere in the universe and will never change:
Lightspeed in vacuum. It's also the upper speed limit to most physical
Sure it would lead to rather bulky numbers if we had to express speeds
as fractions of lightspeed, but a prefix could solve that:
lightspeed = 299792458 m/s
micro-lightspeed = 299792.458 m/s
nano-lightspeed = 299.792458 m/s
pico-lightspeed = 0.299792458 m/s = 1.0792528488 km/h
the pico-lightspeed is remarkably close to a speed unit in regular use!
Just how to abbreviate it? Lightspeed in physics is usually "c" so it
would be "pc" but that's also used for "parsec", a non-SI unit of
distance in astronomy ....
(The decimal system is also arbitrary, however. Most universal would be
if we all used binary, but that would lead to impractically long
numbers, again. Octal or hexadecimal would work just as well ....)
tobias
Klaus von der Heyde
> Even the metric system is arbitrary.
Is that a problem?
K.
Dr J R Stockton
Feb 2011 16:58:41, tobias b koehler <tbk....@gmail.com> posted:
It would be even more trouble to implement than it will be to get the
backward countries to change to Metric.
For a start, all of the present working standards, including those in
legislation, would need to be replaced.
It could not be done until ALL of the SI base units could be maintained
from the "natural" standards both sufficiently readily and at least as
reproducibly as they are maintained, in part from artefacts, at present.
--
(c) John Stockton, near London. *@merlyn.demon.co.uk/?.?.Stockton@physics.org
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