Hello Xcole,
I have not been reading posts at this board much and I missed yours of 4Feb. I was just now catching up and saw your kind words
[[Moving off the subject, maybe you have read some of the flurry of bulletins from Leonard on various sites. Leonard is trying to construct some weights & measures on his own.
Whatever my views about Leonard's efforts, he at least appears to be honest. That is, before he builds a house, he lays the foundation first. That is, Leonard built a system, and then started constructing other weights & measures to match.]]
I may say that your words show sympathy for a fellow system-builder. In fact rather than inventing things myself, I am trying to elaborate and humanize a system which another person or persons discovered, but it is all part of one craft.
It is not exactly MY house that I am working on (although maybe this does not matter very much) but is one that the German Max Planck was working on already in 1899 and also, and this is very strange, a house that an IRISHMAN named George Johnstone Stoney was working on back in 1876 when he delivered a paper in Belfast called "On the Physical Units of Nature" to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This Irishman came of a landed family living in the country west of Dublin and was an astronomer in his early years---one of the first to recognize galaxies as separate and distant from the milky way---and then turned to physics and discovered a system of units in nature.
Later he gave the name "electron" to the particle of electricity before Sir Joseph John Thomson discovered it. So Stoney named something before anybody else suspected that it was there. He was always doing surprising things like that.
Some other Irishmen have put his picture on the web, so you can see what he looked like if you know how to use Google. He had a large black curly beard.
So these units which have started to become popular with people in certain fields of basic science and are called "Planck" units actually go back, in a slightly skewed preliminary sort of way, to this obscure Irishman Stoney that almost nobody has ever heard of.
But one cannot call them "Stoney units" because that would confuse all the scientists, who don't know where their units came from and don't care as long as they work.
XCOLE! WHAT ARE WE DOING? Why do humans construct systems? It is more akin to writing symphonies or painting the frescos of a chapel than people realize. Where does the impulse to do this come from? Did you live in a cave in some earlier life and draw bison and horses on the wall? I joke. I do not believe in such nonsense. But men have arranged stones in circles and observed the rising of the sun and drawn bison on the walls of the cave for a very long time. Why?
There is an aesthetic component (one wants the system to be graceful) and there is an element of reverence.
Reverence for the universe or nature. And then there is the human factor---you are always insisting that your system belongs to "every man woman and child."
It appears that you want your system to involve the human mind (every man woman and child) in a vision you have of the physical world.
By and large the people at this site are Philistine Scoffers. Bryan Parry said whenever he would say something dozenal he would get "booed and egged" by people and this is the normal way to treat prophets. The visionary might get the last laugh, but often it's posthumous.
I admire your knowledge of history but I am resolved not to consider any system unless the speed of light in it is a power of ten.
We can, I believe, be of no practical use to each other, since we are flying our separate wood-and-canvas biplanes in separate directions. But we can salute each other courteously for all that. Be well.
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