I found this in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner. In the chapter on the Great Pyramid, he prints the fourth verse of some weird song printed by The International Standard, which goes:
Then down with every “metric” scheme/Taught by the foreign school/We’ll worship still our Father’s God!/And keep our Father’s “rule”!/A perfect inch, a perfect pint/The Anglo’s honest pound,/Shall hold their place upon the earth,/Till time’s last trump shall sound!
Just thought we could use a little humor here before erislover and Gorsnak overload.
After 1824, the answer was different depending upon whether one was in the US or the British Empire. The US used the older “Queen Anne” measure. Pax Britannia used the “Imperial” measure.
The smallest uniquely-named unit in both was called a “minim”. The US minim was about 61.115 microliters. The British minim was about 59.194 microliters. However, if one then claims that this would make the old system “useless” for smaller measurement, one would be forced to reject the SI (what is so often badly mis-called “metric”–SI replaced metric years ago) even more vehemently, since the smallest uniquely-named SI volume unit is the liter.
Rainin could make a micropipettor that worked in fractions of minims just as easily as they could make one working in fractions of liters.
There is a measurement system that is based on truly fundamental units and not arbitrary lengths. It’s the Planck System.
It’s based on the following fundamental physical constants:
hbar (the reduced Planck’s constant)
G (fundamental gravitational constant)
c (free speed of light in a vacuum)
k (Boltzmann constant)
e (magnitude of charge on an electron)
A little math gives us the following
Length 1.616E-35 m
Mass 2.177E-08 kg
Time 5.391E-44 s
Temperature 1.417E+32 K
(Actually a full set of units can be worked out, but I’m sticking to the above for convenience.)
The above units are fundamental (in a physics sense) and non-arbitrary.
However, you will also notice that they are inconvenient. So, to use them, one would have to impose some sort of conversion factor. Since we do base-ten counting, one could just move decimal places.
Of course, one can have them broken up in a decimal system similar to SI, thus producing a system that is superior to SI, since it is both non-arbitrary and works well with our number system.
The specific units of the SI are all arbitrary in their size and not based upon fundamental physical constants. If you can show me the math that shows how the meter, kilogram, and second are directly based on fundamental physical constants, I’d like to see it.
Erislover: you seemed to have ignored the post that explained exactly what it was you were complaining that you did not understand. Please tell us, are you ignoring this on purpose?
Okay, since I posted this, I’ve gone to the liquor section of my local grocery store and read some labels.
Apparently, here in Northern California at least, the common sizes for bottles of hard liquor (vodka, whiskey, gin, etc.) are 375 ml, 750 ml, and 1.75 liter. Your average wine bottle is also 750 ml, but a “large” wine bottle is 1.5 liters.
The 375 ml, 750 ml, and 1.75 ml figures are consistent with what I posted earlier. However, none of these liquor bottles claimed to be a “pint”, or a “fifth”, or a “half gallon” anywhere on the bottle. Perhaps the article I copied the above post from was merely making this point:
Pint-sized bottles of liquor have been supplanted by 375 ml bottles on the store shelves.
“Fifth” bottles of liquor have been supplanted by 750 ml bottles on the store shelves.
Half-gallon-sized bottles of liquor have been supplanted by 1.75 liter bottles on the store shelves.
… which doesn’t sound nearly as nasty as what I originally thought it said, but it still means there’s less in a bottle than you used to get.
Of course, but one would simply measure them in the current iteration of the Planck unit-derived system and then adjust the system recursively to fit the refined measurement.
The problem with the Planck system is that some of its units do not lend themselves to direct measurement.
Sure, the electrical charge of an electron and the speed of light in a vacuum can be measured relatively easily, but what about Planck’s-constant-over-2-pi? What about G, and the Boltzman constant? None of these 3 values can be measured experimentally without reference to some other quantity (e.g. the mass of the experimental substance used to determine G, the temperature of the object used to determine k, the frequency of the photon used to determine h-bar).
F****, I read this old thread from february and followed the hot discussion between erislover and Grosnak, wondering when erislover will finally get the point he seems to ignore (willingly?) but now I am at the end and it seems that erislover still did not address the following questions alread posted a long time ago by Curious Canuck:
You have two bookcases, one of which is 2 feet 8 3/4 inches wide, the other of which is 3 feet 4 1/2 inches wide. If you line them up side-by-side against your living room wall, how wide will the two of them be together? Will they both be able to fit in the 6-foot-wide space between your sliding glass door and your backyard window?
You know, if you are going to make up stuff the least you could do is make it plausible.
First of all, land maps are not marked in nautical miles anywhere. Does “nautical” mean anything to you?
Second, the Romans had no clue of what a nautical mile was.
Third, you do not walk a nautical mile in 1000 paces, I don’t care what you say.
Fourth, you measured long distances in Europe by counting your steps? Really? You do that in other countries too? Really?
And after counting steps for hours and hours of walking you have some problem with multiplying the number of paces by 0.8 m or whatever the length of your step is? You find that too complex?
Not entirely true. Aviation sectional area charts are designed to be read in nautical miles – modern airspeed indicators are even calibrated knots.
Of course, you could argue that an aviation chart isn’t really a land map, even though it shows features on the surface of the land.
Maybe he has really really long legs.
Or maybe he considers “one pace” to be stepping forward with your right foot, then stepping forward with your left foot (what I’d always learned as being two paces).
If I were a pot of water, I might care when I boiled or froze. Then Centigrade would make sense. Since I’m not, I prefer farenheit, where 100 degrees is really hot, and 0 degrees is really cold.
Ba-doom, ksssh! He’ll be here all week! Tip your waitstaff!
But seriously, folks:
Yesterday I went shopping for a tape measure calibrated in centimeters. It was a sobering experience. Of the two dozen or so different models of tape measure in the hardware store, only two of them were marked in centimeters – and both of those were also marked in feet-and-inches.
As disappointing as this was for the state of the metric system here in the U.S., though, there were a couple of other tape measures I saw which really really really pointed out the deficiencies in the Imperial system of units better than any pro-metric flag-waver ever could. They had tape measures that were marked in – I’m not kidding here – tenths of a foot! :eek:
