otherwise it would be like normalizing "h" instead of h-bar.

also the natural unit charge should be e/sqrt(4*pi*alpha).

if your gonna "fix" the metric system, you should fix it right.
:-)

Hello Robert, nice to hear from you.
I didn't think anyone besides Bryan Parry and myself knew of this board.
I hope you work out a set of humanscale natural units
based on hbar,c,and 4piG.

I posted a bunch of quotes from JBaez at metricsucks and worked out sizes of some humanscale units along those lines. But did not go as far as you propose to and change the elementary charge.

If you work out units along those lines you are more than welcome to post them here, where discussion would be possible. If you find a better place, please tell me the url and I will visit.

You can be assured of favorable comment since it is definitely something that should be presented and tried--it just clashes somewhat with the hbar,c,G approach.

Leonard

Robert,
I put some Baez exerpts (which I am sure you know) in a nearby thread, and also derived sizes of humansize units which are poweroften scaled Baez units.

Robert BJ was in a recent discussion of planck units
at usenet (sci.physics.research) and talking to Baez, one of the moderators. On March 12 Baez had this to say

[[Message 11 in thread
From: John Baez (baez@galaxy.ucr.edu)
Subject: Re: Perturbing fundamental constants
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Date: 2003-03-12 22:12:47 PST


In article <BA92DC5B.A835%rbj@surfglobal.net>,
robert bristow-johnson <rbj@surfglobal.net> wrote:

>If length, time, or mass are not dimensionless quantities, then neither are
>c, hbar, nor G, no matter *what* set of units you define.

Right. Ergo, Lodder must have been talking about units where length, time and mass *are* dimensionless quantities.
There is no angel from on high that comes down and punishes you if you decide to use units where hbar, c and G are 1 and are dimensionless.

Nor is there one that comes down and punishes you
if you decide to use units where hbar, c and G are 1 but have dimensions of ML^2/T, L/T and L^3/MT^2.

The angels only get fluttered if you flip-flop and change conventions within a single given calculation.

Apart from that, it's up to you to choose your system of units, including how many independent "dimensions" you want, and what they are.

It's common to work with units where length, time and mass are the 3 basic dimensions. It's common to take the units of these quantities to be the Planck length, Planck time and Planck mass.

It's also common to work with units where everything is dimensionless.

It's also common to work with units where there are more than 3 basic dimensions - for example, people often take temperature and charge as dimensions in addition to length, time and mass.]]


In a followup post replying to a further question Baez wrote:

[[Date: 2003-03-12 22:13:09 PST
In article <BA917A37.A7E8%rbj@surfglobal.net>,
robert bristow-johnson <rbj@surfglobal.net> wrote:

>In article b45us8$lnb$1@glue.ucr.edu, John Baez at baez@galaxy.ucr.edu wrote
>> alpha = e^2 / hbar c
>unless you changed epsilon0 enough to compensate.

I was working in units where 4 pi epsilon0 = 1, as typical in theoretical physics.

>why do physicists leave epsilon0 out of alpha?
>
> alpha = e^2 / (hbar c 4 pi epsilon0)

Because lots of us use units where 4 pi epsilon = 1.
It's considered unpleasant to have this extra crap cluttering up the beauty of Maxwell's equations. It's just a matter of taste, though; if you like seeing 4's and pi's and epsilons, go ahead and stick 'em in there.]]

I've momentarily mislaid some Frank Wilcek material
so here, just to have it handy, is from his
June 2001 Scaling Mt.Planck article in Physics Today:

Franck Wilczek, June 2001 Physics Today
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-6/p12.html


"...Soon after Max Planck introduced his constant in the course of a phenomenological fit to the blackbody radiation spectrum, he pointed out the possibility[Footnote 3] of building a system of units based on the three fundamental constants hbar, c, and G. Indeed, from these three we can define a unit of mass (hbar c/G)^1/2, a unit of length (hbar G/c^3)^1/2, and a unit of time (hbar G/c^5)^1/2--what we now call the Planck mass, length, and time, respectively. Planck's proposal for a system of units based on fundamental physical constants was, when it was made, formally correct but rather thinly rooted in fundamental physics. Over the course of the 20th century, however, his proposal became compelling. Now there are profound reasons to regard c as the fundamental unit of velocity and hbar as the fundamental unit of action. In the special theory of relativity, there are symmetries relating space and time--and c serves as a conversion factor between the units in which space intervals and time intervals are measured. In quantum theory, the energy of a state is proportional to the frequency of its oscillations--and hbar is the conversion factor. Thus c and hbar appear directly as primary units of measurement in the basic laws of these two great theories. Finally, in general relativity theory, spacetime curvature is proportional to the density of energy--and G (actually c^4/G) is the conversion factor."

Wilczek gives a footnote to the original 1899 paper in which Planck derived these units from basic intrinsic properties of nature and proposed these "natural units" for use in science as an alternative to the metric system. Subsequent history seems to be gradually confirming Planck's hunch.

Here is another exerpt, this from Wilczek's August 2002 Scaling Mt.Planck article, the third in the series.

"Let's quickly recollect the main points of the two earlier columns in this series. Gravity appears extravagantly feeble on atomic and laboratory scales, ultimately because the proton's mass m is much smaller than the Planck mass M =(h-bar,c/G)^1/2, where hbar is Planck's quantum of action, c is the speed of light, and G is Newton's gravitational constant. Numerically, m /M is approximately 10-18. If we aspire, in line with Planck's original vision and with modern ambitions for the unification of physics, to use the natural (Planck) system of units constructed from c, hbar, and G (see "Scaling Mount Planck I: A View from the Bottom," Physics Today, June 2001, page 12), and if we agree that the proton is a natural object, then the very small ratio appears at first blush to pose a very big embarrassment. It mocks the central tenet of dimensional analysis, which is that natural quantities expressed in natural units should have numerical values close to unity.

Fortunately, we have a deep dynamical understanding of the origin of the proton's mass, thanks to quantum chromodynamics..."

[Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]