Reply to post: Re: SI

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: SI

"Standard measurements are good, obviously, but the ones we have are still arbitrary bullshit when you get down to it."

Any system of units will be arbitrary since the convenient fundamentals of the universe, in human terms, are either very large (c) or very small (e.g. rest mass of electron). They are going to require big multipliers or dividers to get practical units. Why use exact powers of 10? Why not use binary numbers? The power of 2 used will still be arbitrary.

In fact the metre, kilogram and second are pretty convenient human-scale units. You can argue for the foot and the pound if you like, but in powers of 10 terms there's no real difference and once gravity is involved, at a rather convenient roughly 10ms-2, or air pressure at an equally convenient approx, 10Ncm-2, SI has real practical advantages for rough calculations. The fact that the size of the mm more or less eliminates decimal points from building plans is an added convenience, unless you really like working with yards, feet, inches and 1/32inches. The cgs system, on the other hand, did give rather silly numbers.

So, arbitrary but far from bullshit.

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