Seems to me that the most viable argument _for_ the metric system is that not everybody is a physicist. We poor laymen should also be given a chance to assess our environment, where the freezing point of water is at convenient 0 degrees Celsius (and not 2,73x10^2K or 0,33x10^-48 gigapixels per square toe nail). Just imagine how the weather forecast would look like! :-) anyhow, an interesting idea.
Greetings, Leo

leo@leomeyer.de

thanks for the greeting, and for mentioning
that the idea seems interesting

it is difficult to bridge the gap between
good units for physics and good units for everyday life
and your criticism is right in some respects

it is probably worth *trying* to bridge the gap, in my opinion.

I want to arrive at human-scale practical units which can be used as an alternative to metric in undergraduate physics courses and which will embody
the natural constants (make c, hbar, k, e, avogadro number, G equal to E7, E-40, E-25, E-23, E23, E-15)

as for temperature, most physical formulas use the
absolute (kelvin scale) where freezing is 273.15 kelvin
and I have simply imitated that here.

The scale I have called "grade" is an absolute scale
not suitable for everyday life. But it would be simple to construct a relative scale to go with it.

then freezing could be zero on that relative scale.

for the other units, they do not seem to me to be the wrong size for the layman to use! The units of mile and gallon seem fortuitously to come out a familiar and convenient size---with roots in European tradition.

The talent mass unit---about 50 pounds or 100 medieval german marks---is not totally without precedent either.

It just happens that the units Max Planck proposed as superior to metric ones in several respects (because universal and intrinsic to nature) have some easy relations to certain traditional units.

So perhaps this adaptation of Planck units does not have to alienate the layman. Or so I hope anyway.

Hope to hear from you again!

Leonard

To Leo Meyer: this thread seems inactive so, in the absence of conversation, I will use it as a place to park a story about Dubya copied from the metricsucks board. (Orig. was in response to an earlier "Comet impact FAQ" post)

How GWBush eliminated poverty

On Thursday the President dispatched metricsucks eric to the Kuiper belt with a supply of megaton devices. Eric was instructed to nudge a comet out of orbit so that it would fall into the inner solar system in such a way as to eliminate excess population and solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and disease.

The Kuiper Belt of comets extends out 30 to 100 AU.
WHAT IS CIRCULAR ORBIT SPEED AT 100 AU? That is at 100 times the earth's orbit radius.

Answer in TM terms: earth's speed is 1000 miles a minute and sqrt of 100 is 10, so speed is one tenth of earth's or 100 miles a minute. It's about the speed of a TV satellite in stationary orbit around earth.

*******************

Here is a good webpage about where most of the comets are.

****the rest is a quote from the U.of Arizona site***
[[The Kuiper Belt and The Oort Cloud

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/kboc.html

OORT CLOUD

In 1950 Jan Oort noticed that
1. no comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it came from interstellar space,
2. there is a strong tendency for aphelia of long period comet orbits to lie at a distance of about 50,000 AU, and
3. there is no preferential direction from which comets come.

From this he proposed that comets reside in a vast cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system. This has come to be known as the Oort Cloud. The statistics imply that it may contain as many as a trillion (1e12) comets. Unfortunately, since the individual comets are so small and at such large distances, we have no direct evidence about the Oort Cloud.

The Oort Cloud may account for a significant fraction of the mass of the solar system, perhaps as much or even more than Jupiter. (This is highly speculative, however; we don't know how many comets there are out there nor how big they are.)

KUIPER BELT

The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the Sun containing many small icy bodies. It is now considered to be the source of the short-period comets.

Occasionally the orbit of a Kuiper Belt object will be disturbed by the interactions of the giant planets in such a way as to cause the object to cross the orbit of Neptune. It will then very likely have a close encounter with Neptune sending it out of the solar system or into an orbit crossing those of the other giant planets or even into the inner solar system.

There are presently nine known objects orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune (including 2060 Chiron (aka 95 P/Chiron) and 5145 Pholus; see the MPC's list). The IAU has designated this class of objects as Centaurs. These orbits are not stable. These objects are almost certainly "refugees" from the Kuiper Belt. Their future fate is not known. Some of these show some cometary activity (ie, their images are a little fuzzy indicating the presence of a diffuse coma). The largest of these is Chiron which is about 170 km in diameter, 20 times larger than Halley. If it ever is perturbed into an orbit that approaches the Sun it will be a truly spectacular comet.

Curiously, it seems that the Oort Cloud objects were formed closer to the Sun than the Kuiper Belt objects. Small objects formed near the giant planets would have been ejected from the solar system by gravitational encounters. Those that didn't escape entirely formed the distant Oort Cloud. Small objects formed farther out had no such interactions and remained as the Kuiper Belt objects.

Several Kuiper Belt objects have been discovered recently including 1992 QB1 and 1993 SC (above). They appear to be small icy bodies similar to Pluto and Triton (but smaller). There are more than 300 known trans-Neptunian objects (as of mid 2000); see the MPC's list. Many orbit in 3:2 resonance with Neptune (as does Pluto). Color measurements of some of the brightest have shown that they are unusually red. In late 2002, a Kuiper Belt object over 1000 km in diameter was discovered and provisionally designated 2002 LM60 "Quaoar".

It is estimated that there are at least 35,000 Kuiper Belt objects greater than 100 km in diameter, which is several hundred times the number (and mass) of similar sized objects in the main asteroid belt.

A team of astronomers led by Anita Cochran report that the Hubble Space Telescope has detected extremely faint Kuiper Belt objects (left). The objects are very small and faint perhaps only 20 km or so across. There may be as many as 100 million such comets in low-inclination orbits and shining brighter than the HST's magnitude-28 limit. (A follow-up HST observation failed to confirm this observation, however.)

Spectra and photometric data have been obtained for 5145 Pholus. Its albedo is very low (less than 0.1). Its spectra indicates the presence of organic compounds, which are often very dark (e.g. the nucleus of Comet Halley).

Some astronomers believe that Triton, Pluto and its moon Charon are merely the largest examples of Kuiper Belt objects. (But even if this is true, it will not affect Pluto's official designation as a "major planet" for historical reasons.)

But these are more than distant curiosities. They are almost certainly pristine remnants of the nebula from which the entire solar system was formed. Their composition and distribution places important constraints on models of the early evolution of the solar system. ]]

Hello p.d.,
thanks for the encouragement to edit
you gave me a couple of days ago. I've
erased some redundant (older version)
stuff and updated some other pages.

I want the site to have some variety so
as to have a chance of different sections
appealing to different sorts of readers, but
there was too much
and that can be confusing
so I've been making things more uniform
trying to use a fairly standard version of
talent-mile units throughout most of the site, for example, or at least clearly isolate the exceptions.
still have a lot to do

I had a question about something you said.
were you bothered by trimming in metric producing
(at least if it is handled that way) a different
sized volt---I think it was 0.76 conventional volt or
something. Was this what you indicated was too much
of a distortion?

I think if the units are supposed to be used at first
in undergrad physics courses that might not be so bad---having a different sized volt.
In the practical world people could get confused and
hurt themselves and burn out equipment and stuff if
the volt unit was changed. But in the context of coursework---indeed for years there WERE differnt size
voltage units in use and people managed OK. So maybe it is not a fatal flaw after all. But you can decide about that, in the case of trimmed metric, to the extent you want to pursue it.

I'm wondering whether or not to include the story about how Epeeist ran over the cat with his bicycle. People who like cats might be offended. Or perhaps it
is just outrageous enough and does not cross the line.

You know *some* people will get offended at anything. Too bad for them. If they are offended by sincere effort, then let them be offended. That may be just the NY in me, but it would seem that this site should be as it is, not a pity party for those who have had the misfortune to be born with their noses out of joint. Sort of like R and E from "that other site". That sort will prevent any progress from ever occurring. They offer little that is constructive, but when they see something they either do not understand or disagree with, then they appoint YOU as the the bad guy of one sort or another. Hopefully, if one ignores them, they will ignore you. And i see nothing wrong with that.

Was very taken with "trimmed metric" until you pointed out the celsius problem and the Ohm's Law problem. I think that a miss of the mark on the order of 25% is definitely an excessively large distortion. Up to 5% or so is acceptable to me. At the risk of giving away my statistical upbringing here, 5% is generally considered at the border of significance/insignificance. Thus when the adjustments either to the metric system or to the T-M system were less than 5%, i accepted them enthusiastically snd whole heartedly. You wondered about J-P Magana's response. I think he would have a hissy-fit at a volt that was ~25% off and likewise a temp scale that is 24% off. That is why i brought up Reaumur. His temp scale (acc to my mental calcs) should considerably reduce the temp distortion. To refresh your memory, Reaumur's temp scale has water freezing at 0 and boiling at 80. What do you think?

What do I think?
random irrelevancies about Reaumur
Forget when he was born 1685? but died
1757 which I think was within a year of
when WmBlake and/or WAMozart were born.
YES damn it! I had not noticed for some
reason that Reaumur's alcohol expansion scale (1730)
has a degree not all that different from
the Planck degree. And Reaumur scale was used at
one time over much if not all of CONTINENTAL EUROPE!

In the talent-mile system we've been considering
here the degree is 1.4145 celsius and Reaumur's
degree is 1.25 celsius. So ours is 13 percent
larger than the Reaumur degree.

I'm still editing at planck.com
Have removed a lot of stuff.
What to do with all that psychological room.
(The host doesn't care how much or little space
planck takes but I feel like I have created
some extra space and should make some furniture
for it.) Still a lot of editing to do, trashing
or updating stuff that's two years old,
getting rid of the more foolish terminology
and so on.

BTW a printed Britannica says R didnt choose the
number 80 but just put zero at freezing and
made the step on the column correspond to 1/1000
of the volume of the ball-shaped reservoir at the
bottom. It just turned out that boiling was 80,
so that was what people eventually took as defining
the scale.

For Reaumur, if the alcohol expanded by 1/1000 of
the reservoir volume and went up the tube by that
amount of volume then the temp was 1 degree.
If it expanded by 2/1000 of the reservoir volume
then it was 2 degrees ...

So he scale was an historical accident depending on
the coefficient of expansion of the particular whiskey-proof and the particular alcohol he happened to pick.
I hope that he chose a good grade of cognac rather than, say, vodka. In any case what size the dgree turned out depended on that choice of beverage.
to choose

The little freighter is a converted 180' CG buoy tender. Because its gross tonnage is considerably over 1000 GT it is a ship by legal definition. It is slated for further conversion as a hospital ship for the Marshall Islands, though at the rate things are going, it is questionable whether she will ever participate in so noble a destiny. We were to take her from the Houston ship Channel thru the Panama Canal to San Francisco and on to the Marshall Islands. Unfortunately however she has been idle at the dock in Houston since August. Sickening.

I am picturing 180' by 35' beam by 20' draft. wild guesses.
I am picturing low to the water amidships so as to be able to haul buoys aboard.

And bow and stern high for seaworthiness since CG must tend buoys in heavy weather.

I am picturing it circulating among the Marshall islands as a hospital ship. Wow. nice people polynesians in my limited experience. have their own seafaring tradition. anybody probably has good will for a hospital ship. could have been really nice.

We need the present idea sketched out here in brief.

I cannot take the job of being in charge of it.
Whatever you write down here I can add to, or even edit if necessary. I can check numbers. I can help. But it is up to you to supply the main outline.

If I made a rough sketch of it on metricsucks or somewhere, and you want, copy and paste it here for a start.

I think it goes something like this G, c, e, k, hbar

7.06....E-11, 3E8, 1.6E-19, 1.3E-23, E-34.

The figure for G is not exact and just comes out to be 7.06-something, as I recall.

You take a conventional second as the time unit and
say 3E8 meters per second for light and that tells you what meter is.

Then you say E-34 kilogram sq.meter per second for hbar and that tells you what kilogram is. And collaterally tells you what joule is.

then you say 1.3E-23 joule per kelvin for k, and that tells you what the kelvin is. And so on.

It is not so hard to calculate what the trimmed meter and kilogram etc are.

For example the new meter is smaller than the old by a factor of 299792458 divided by 3E8.

Or if you like the look better, a factor of 2.99792458 divided by 3.

The new kilo is larger by factor of 1.0545716 x 9/2.99792458^2. It comes to 1.05603.. I think.

The new joule is also 1.0545716.. of the old joule

the main thing to do is simply to decide
what numbers to have for c,e,k,hbar. Just now
I have assumed you would say 3E8, 1.6E-19, 1.3E-23, and E-34.

BTW if you pick 1.3E-23 for Boltzmann then new kelvin
is 1.0545716 x 1.3 divided by 1.38065 = 0.99297 of old kelvin. It will make water boil at 100.7 new degrees instead of 100 old degrees. Barely different.

Sometimes trimmed metric bothers me as too tempting an alternative to a straight planckian thing.

We should not worry about that. The thing to do is get it tabulated with some equivalences to old metric. A couple of tables for people to concentrate attention on. Post it here. Dont worry about any mistakes, can be corrected later if need be.

Hello there. The figure 1.0545716 is somewhat disquieting. It is more than 5% divergence from the "old metric" to which it relates. How did you come to this exact value? Also the new kelvin means that water boils at 100.7, a VERY ugly pimple that begs to be popped on the ass of Celsius. Would you think that the Réaumur scale would constitute a more viable alternative? At any rate, as far as Celsius is concerned, if the new kelvin is is equal to the old kelvin divided by 1.0545716, then how do you come to 100.7 for boiling? Might i be crossing wires here?

Very good visualization of the buoy tender, but she is a bit smaller than you envisioned. She has a draft of 12 ft at the bow and trimmed 1 ft by the stern for a draft of 13 ft there. Quite a respectable draft for a ship of her size, thereby making her ride quite well. Beam is ~32 ft. BTW now it is MY turn to take the opportunity to tell YOU something about measurement!! As you undoubtedly know, ships are admeasured according to their gross tonnage. But did you know that gross tonnage is defined as a direct measure of VOLUME and implies weight only indirectly? There is a wide misconception among lubbers that gross tonnage is a measure of weight. This certainly is not the case. One gross ton (henceforth denoted as GT) is defined as 100 cu ft. And incidently 100 cu ft of seawater just happens to weigh 2240 lbs. This is why the Brits define the long ton to equal 2240 lbs! It is the weight of 100 cu ft of seawater! Correlarily (malapropism not only intended but flaunted!) because seawater is denser than distilled water, the ship will float higher in it than in fresh water. All plimsoll marks bear witness to this reality. Also the temp of seawater affects the draft of the ship floating therein! This is also borne witness by the mark colloquially referred to in English speaking nations as the "A-B line". But so much for that. What do you think of "grads" in lieu of "degrees"? Grads are decimalized to a much greater extent than degrees, you know...

What if we picked 1.4E-23 for Boltzmann? Would this clean up the temp scale to the point at which Réaumur might be resurrected? And what would be the exact value of Boltzmann's constant for the "perfect 80" of Réaumur's temp scale? Personally i find the Réaumur temp scale whereby 1 degree equals 1/1000 of the delta volume of the alcohol resevoir to be nigh irresistable. And i have no doubt whatever that you find it likewise. Would this 1.4E-23 have the consequence of popping the Celsius pimple, but at the cost of raising a boil on the ass of other metric quantities?

About Reaumur I am just going on an encyclopedia article and the little that I found on web. I cannot swear that any of it is correct but I read that the expanision coefficient depends on what kind of alcohol and the kind that Reaumur liked to put in his thermometers just happened to make a "perfect 80" between freezing and boiling.

Perhaps we have already disussed this, I favor either a good single malt scotch or else a French cognac, for determining Boltzmann's constant, but you may have a different preference. Just joking.

You asked so many questions I can only reply to a few of them.

You asked whence the number 1.0545716.

At any "physics constants" website you can find the metric value of hbar. They usually say
1.0545716...E-34 joule second.

So if you keep second the same (as I think you wish to) and put hbar equal a flat E-34 then joule has to
get larger to take up slack and in fact new joule
must be 1.0545716 old joule.

This effects the kilogram because the joule is related to it:

joule = kilogram (meter/second)^2

And the one thing I am sure of is that you want
new meter = 2.99792458/3 old meter (just a hair shorter)

new joule = new kilo (new meter/second)^2 means that
if new joule is 1.0545..old, then new kilo is 1.0560..old.

If that is too much divergence, try making hbar be
1.05E-34 joule second.

this will make new joule = 1.0545716/1.05 old.
New joule being 1.00435..old joule will cause
new kilo to be 1.00574 old kilo.

Then the new lineup of constants is

c exactly 3E8 meter/sec
hbar exactly 1.05E-34 joule sec
k exactly 1.4E-23 joule/kelvin (say)

I believe this makes new kelvin = 1.0096 old kelvin

You can see, perhaps, why I have never explored this before---it is oppressively nitpicking at the level of details. However, let us stoically go through it:

new second = old
new meter = 2.99792458/3 old
new kilo = 1.00574.. old
new joule = 1.00435.. old
new kelvin = 1.0096.. old

exact values of constants:
c = 3E8 meter/second
hbar = 1.05E-34 joule second
k = 1.4E-23 joule/kelvin

approx. value of G:
7.061..E-11 cubmeter/sqsec per kilo instead of
6.673..E-11 in old units.

You asked what would be the exact value to
give Boltzmann so as to get a perfect 80 which would mean making the new kelvin 1.25 old kelvin.

All else being equal it would mean boosting the 1.4 by a factor of 1.25/1.0096. I shrink from doing this.


Indeed p.d. having taken a closer look I urge you to
discard this attempt to get a trimmed set that is within 5 percent of the old sizes. Better (it seems to me now) to hit for round numbers and let chips fall where they may fall. But you must decide. Actually what is outlined here is not too bad since sizes change by less than one percent and constants are fairly clean.

And so what if water boils at 99 new celsius? I do not like putting boiling water on a pedestal and letting it rule my life. 99 is fine for boiling water. The important thing, as I see it, is to make boltzmann k be something simple like 1.4 and screw water. One must keep one's priorities.

best wishes

do you perhaps have a possible berth on another ship?

****previous****


The new kilo is larger by factor of 1.0545716 x 9/2.99792458^2. It comes to 1.05603.. I think.

The new joule is also 1.0545716.. of the old joule

the main thing to do is simply to decide
what numbers to have for c,e,k,hbar. Just now
I have assumed you would say 3E8, 1.6E-19, 1.3E-23, and E-34.

BTW if you pick 1.3E-23 for Boltzmann then new kelvin
is 1.0545716 x 1.3 divided by 1.38065 = 0.99297 of old kelvin. It will make water boil at 100.7 new degrees instead of 100 old degrees. Barely different.

Hi P.D.

impressive breadth and depth of reading, in your posts. I know Galileo wrote dialogs to get science points across. he was an effective popularizer and advocate of new science.
what would he have done with internet message boards.
I personally, regret to say, have not read more than a few snatches of Galileo's dialogs (I think they often involve not just two but three personae or viewpoints, and occasional humor.) Maybe you are more familiar.

I am not sure about some nautical language. I think "striking for second mate" means working for a promotion in rank---perhaps taking a test of some sort. If so that means you only recently, like 1999, became second mate. Congratulations!

One thing that impresses me very much is that Galileo (around 1610 or 1615?) got the idea light might have a finite measurable speed. He and a friend tried to measure it by flashing lanterns back and forth in the hills outside Florence.

Although it did not work, his writing about it may have prepared Ole Roemer's mind for his discovery in 1675 of the speed of light. Roemer a young danish astronomer actually measured it to within 10 percent or so accuracy.

Just getting the idea that it might have a finite speed that you could measure, instead of being instantaneous. Like sighting a new continent. A major step in human consciousness of nature. This impresses me about Galileo.

I suppose "dianetic" refers to Scientologists undergoing a process involving instruments like "lie detectors" or emotion-detectors in order to neutralize emotional response. One should perhaps not mock Scientologists because they are tough customers. I am trying to rephrase what you said. correct me if I am misinformed about what "dianetic" means. I will think about carefulness.

However the phrase "dianetic space cadets" gave me a moment of hilarious joy when I read it in A2 post at metricsucks.


[[Remote first cause is an interest of mine.]]

Of everybody. People like Jefferson were, I believe, called "Deists" as a code name for those who think that some intelligence may have set things up and established the natural laws but may possibly be just letting things run on autopilot and not currently present and involving itself in our concerns. Very remote.
Deists were resented in the 18th century. There was apparently a Deist element in the freemasons and this was one reason for the persecution of freemasons in the late 18th or early 19th. These are old forgotten matters, but serve to remind us of the abiding interest people have in remote first cause.

I am not a native Californian. Actually I am more an Upstate New Yorker and also partly grew up in and around NY city. Not too different from you probably.

You are right to caution about reining in the most flamboyant excesses and not trying to insult as many groups of people as possible in one paragraph. But what else do we live for?

Will think about this some more especially after the
warning from Lieutenant Sanctimonious on the other board. Shalom . Peace is a good word in any language.

In an earlier post, you noted your "grade" temperature scale to be "not good for everyday life". I do not think this to be at all true. How about "centigrade"? Wouldn't that be just fine? Although i [personally would probably pout and] do not particularly like that term "grade" to denote temperature because i would like to use it on another project that i am quite serious about, the concept [or referent] of "centigrade" would seem utterly practicable. Although it is self-evident that "grade" represents a unit that is too large to be practical [for everyday life], i do not believe "centigrade" to be so... neither "milligrade"...

How about bringing up my temp scale of 440- freezing, 500 body temp, 600 boiling 440.02 triple point. It seems relevent here.

Yeah, I think that is a nice scale.

(It does not fit particularly well with planckian units which are my particular concern but it certainly would fit well with your efforts to redefine anglo-roman units.)

Basically I think you came across a lucky coincidence that if you define an absolute scale
with zero at the real zero of temperature
and freezing at 440
then it just turns out that body temp is very close to 500 and boiling 600. I think you first brought that up at BWMA board but here is a fine place to discuss it, if you want to, or build the rest of your system up and connect to it.

You mentioned the medieval time unit smaller than a second and I checked Rowlett and found that there really was a medieval time unit *atom* that was down there in the neighborhood of 3/17 of a second---I am interested in 3/17 of a second for other reasons, anyway down there in that range. So I mentioned that in the "Names of Units" thread at this board.

Hello BTW, haven't heard from you in a while.

Hello Bryan. I for one like your temp scale. What is its relation to the Celsius degree, the Farenheit degree, and the Réaumur degree?

Leonard, my net connection is a little mucked up so I'm not onlin e as often as I'ld like

Pint drinker: what do you mean? freezing in celcius is 0, fahrenheit is 32, in mine it is 440.

However, in celcius and fahrenheit (not sure about reamur) there are two fundamental points which are not really reliable (namely the boiling and freezing points of water). My scale is absolute, that is, zero is the lowest temperature possible (as in rankine and kelvin). The fundamental points would most likely be as per usual- triple point, freezing point of gold etc. My scale is scaled so that, if it is found to be inconvenient to work in hundreds of degees for everyday purposes, you may have freezing as 0, absolute zero as -440 etc. Although, I am not sure about that (but the interfacing is there if needed).

Is that what you meant by how does it compare?

note: nice forum LEonard, glad to see it has grown a bit. to be honest, I thought you had given up on it, actually.

Actually, that expression fits what I am trying to do constantly- "update" and neaten not English, but Egnlish-Roman STYLE units. How about an 1800 yd mile while we're at it? No...

Interesting what you say about an 1800 yard mile. We already have an 1851.851851...metre nautical mile. That's a good one, don't you think? But what would be better would be a NAUTICAL mile of EXACTLY 2000 yards. In order for this to occur we would have to increase the length of the "foot" by 1.01260490586% (0.1512588703 in., or just barely over 1/7 in. [or just under 1/6 in])-- take your pick! What do you think about that?

As far as your temp scale is concerned i was looking for a comparison between the sizes of the degree in your scale compared to the sizes of the degree in the Celsius, Farenheit, and Réaumur scales. The Réaumur scale [like Celsius] has triple point of water at 0 deg, but boiling at 80 deg. Leonard says that one degree on your scae is equal to approx 1/2 degree on the Réaumur-- or maybe the other way around. In a hurry and not thinking too well this morning.

one thing that really should be established for this board is that we are only considering coherent systems of units.

these are systems in which the laws of physics work without fudge factors. There is just one basic unit for each type of physical quantity---one unit for every kind of energy---and auxilliary units are simply convenient multiples of the basic ones.

A quantity of physical work is equal to force x distance so the energy unit must equal the unit force multiplied by the unit distance. If you choose a force called "pound" for your force unit and a distance called "foot" for your distance unit, then you must have "foot x pound" or "footpound" for your energy unit.

This quality of consistency without fudge factors is maybe the one sure criterion of what belongs here.

Probably the only law you need to keep in mind, for your purposes Bryan, is F = ma. Coherence means that whatever your units of mass and force are. The unit force must equal the unit mass multiplied by the unit acceleration.
This makes it impossible to describe a system in which the unit distance is a foot and the unit mass is a poundmass and the unit force is pound-sized unless you choose a unit of time that is around 3/17 of a second.

In the past people trying to reform sytems with feet and pounds in them have invented exotic units of mass like "slug" and of force like "poundal" because they were unwilling to consider any time unit but the second. This is ultimately crux of the difficulty experienced by anglo-roman systems in engineering. They have kept the second and had to throw out either the pound mass or the pound force and replace it by some unsympathetic thing like slug or poundal.
The one is an awkwardly large mass (abt.32 poundmass) and the other is an unfamiliar tiny force (abt.1/32 of poundforce.) Or they have abandoned the aim of coherence and used a bunch of fudge factors to get the natural laws to compute right. It is a serious dilemma
and the fundamental reason, I think, for the disappearance of customary units from Engineering schools in the US. My nephew just graduated from a good school with a masters in mech. eng. where the courses were entirely metric and his first job was with a textbook publishing company that was revising all their engineering texts to eliminate all anglo units in favor of pure metric. And his basic attitude is he is disgusted with poundals and slugs and BTU and fudge factors---insists on a clean coherent system.

My feeling is that we can go cleaner than metric, more consistent, more decimal, and that we should. But I do not want anyone to have to go back to BTU and slugs and horsepower and stuff like that.

there has been this unexplained rise in hits since
January. in jan just a handful of "page-reads", then in feb there were over 1400.
i just now checked the "Junk Metric" log and saw that already for month of march there are over 1500

And not even the end of the month yet.
So readership continues to grow even tho
only a few of us are posting messages here.

Leonard, metric is one big fudge. I, for one, like slugs.

Pint drinker, there are 100 degrees between boiling and freezing in celsius, 180 in Fahrenheit, apparently 80 in reamur, and 160 in my scale.

1 degree of mine is half a reamur degree. Nice to hear old reamur still has some suppiorters.

Leonard, I for one don't understand his disgust- I suppose he just loves the 9.80blah blah m/s" for g in metric, does he?

OK Bryan, you like slugs for the unit of mass! Just stick with slugs (and convenient fractions and multiples) whenever you want to measure mass and all will be well

pounds for force
feet for distance
slugs for mass
and seconds for time

If you hold to these things consistently then I believe we will
eventually get a clear description of a system
with (if you so desire) modern definitions of
traditionally-sized units.
And (if you so desire) the definitions can be completely
independent of the presentday metric system. That is,
if you want them to be the units can be based on
the atomic clock second together with the fundamental constants of nature.

YOUR QUESTION ABOUT MY NEPHEW
Yes he does get along quite fine with the figure of 9.80665 meters per second per second for the earth's normal sealevel gravity. No system can have 100 percent slick numbers and there are always some things one has to accomodate. I would guess that your figure is what? 32.174 feet per second per second? I shouldnt seem to speak for my nephew, have just talked a lttle with him about these matters.

An obese man masses 10 slugs. I like that.

I have made a small observation. But this is not the place to publish it!

Hello Bryan, several recent short posts on this thread simply indicated puzzlement with what I was doing vis a vis traditional anglo units. I have deleted them and am going to try again to explain. I think I understand your confusion.

Bear with me please while I try to reformulate things more clearly.

The way the system looks now is

time unit-----second
speed unit (foot per second)----E-9 c, a billionth of lightspeed
action unit (footpound second) ----1.25E34 hbar, a certain exact multiple of the natural unit of action.

defined in this way the foot is independent of the metric unit, and, if one must convert, the foot is 29.9792458 centimeters instead of 30.48 centimeters but so what that is their problem.

defined in this way the pound of force is independent of the metric newton of force and comes out nearly equal to the presentday pound force.

in any coherent system, the other units are formed predictably according to a regular pattern dictated by the laws of physics, so I don't have to waste a lot of words explaining what they are. the mass unit is always equal to the force unit divided by the square of unit speed---so in this case it is pound x sq.(second/foot) and that works out to a mass that happens to weigh about 32 pounds of force in ordinary gravity and is conventionally called a *slug*.

NO NEW NAMES NEED TO BE MADE UP. this is just a long-familiar anglo system with foot, second, poundforce, slugmass that has now been redefined independently of the metric system. Without significantly changing the sizes of the units, they have been redefined by anchoring them directly to the constants c and hbar.

For comparison, the trimmed metric definitions:

time unit----second
speed unit (meter per second) ---- 1/(3E8) of c
action unit (joule second) -----9.5 E33 hbar

the kilogram is by definition joule sq.(second/meter)
because in any coherent system the mass unit is always equal to the energy unit divided by the square of the unit speed----so the other things follow from those three.

this system also contains no surprises and has no room for creativity. there is no significant change in the sizes of any of the units---the numbers have just been cleaned up a bit by replacing 299792458 by 3E8 and likewise with hbar.

For comparison, the centipace ounce definitions:

time unit ---- 54 millisecond
speed unit --- E-9 c ----one billionth of light
action unit ---- E30 hbar ---one nonillion times the natural unit of action.

there is room for some creativity here because the units do not have names. but the other units arise in the same way from the first three. the mass unit (which turns out to be ounce-size) is equal to the force unit divided by the square of the unit speed just as in the other two cases.

I set the three out this way because I want to be able to compare them easily, so I have schematized them in the same way in each case.

An obese man may well mass ten slugs, as you suggest.
I mass slightly over six slugs myself---and you, I would reckon, are at least five.

this board is always surprising me by how much
it is read---just checked log and there'v been
already in march a couple of hundred more hits
than in february.

i am wondering if it would be good to have some physics examples worked two or three different ways:
for example would there be interest in having
examples worked in both reformed anglo-roman and trimmed metric?

actually trying out a system can sometimes be more
entertaining and informative than arguing about it theoretically, so it's a possibility

if anyone wants to suggest a way or ways to enliven things or add usefulness, please do. as always my primary idea is that a teacher of highschool or college physics may come across the board and be motivated to try a modern alternative to the metric system in coursework with students. or that physics students may get disatisfied with metric and prod their instructors to use something more up to date.
so physics problems are the only kind of test-driving I ever think about. If anyone has someother idea for trying the systems out, please explain it.

When i was at U of I, i had a math prof who said that i was very good at math but i did not believe him. He liked it when i would give 2 and 3 different ways of solving a problem. But what i was really doing was hedging my bets in case i made a mistake. I think the same could be applied to physics problems and that an undergraduate would appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of one measurement system as opposed to another. This appreciation could be amplified by having the students solve a single physics problem according to 4 standards:
(A) the "english sytem", (B) the metric system (SI), (C) the metric system (trimmed), and (D) the Planckian system. Then give them an additional bonus question where they could earn extra points by explaining the advantages/disadvantages of each approach, which is easier, which they would prefer to use, etc. Do you think that might help suffice to congeal their Jell-o!?

thinking of firming up one's brain as congealing
one's jello is sheer poetry

I will start a thread by calculating something in both
trimmed metric and reformed anglo-roman. in this case
and at this stage I don't think it would help to try to say one is better than the other----the apparent advantage would swing back and forth depending on the type of problem anyway. It is mainly a matter of casual test-driving or test-flying to satisfy curiosity. Anyway it is a good idea. I will calculate the mass of the sun or something.

I see you adapted my billionth light foot. Good move.

I cannot find this info- please help me somebody:

You say, Leonard, that the degrees between freezing and boiling goes down to 160 (near as damnit) from 161.08 at a certain altitude- how do you calculate how much the pressure drops per whatever altitude? For instance, if I say a pressure of 750mm, then how do ~I ascertain how high uop that is?

Also how *speed of sound* varies with altitude (if not with the concommitant decrease of atmospheric density which is a consequence of it).

there's a fairly simple formula relating speed of
sound to the temperature of the air

(incredibly, Isaac Newton came across this formula
and got it right except for a factor of 7/5 or 5/7 or something, this is almost unbelievable to me, anyway
there is this simple formula for the speed of sound)

and so to predict the speed of sound at some altitude you just need a model of how temperature falls off with altitude.

and there is a fat handbook called CRC handbook of chemistry and physics that is in every school or college library over by the dictionaries and it has in it a long table called "US Standard Atmosphere" which gives the temperature and density and speed of sound to be expected, in some normal or average sense, at each altitude from sealevel up to, well over 50 miles anyway.

CRC also has a table called "Boiling Point of Water from 700 mm to 800 mm. That means mm mercury pressure.
So it gives boiling points for a range of pressures.
And you put the two tables together and find that by going up about 500 feet from sealevel the pressure goes down just a little and it is just enough to bring the boiling point into line with Bryan's temperature scale. I will refine that later. Must have coffee.

I don't know how he originally wrote it or with what symbols. I can just give you a modern version.

there is this amazing constant called boltzmann k which is a ratio of energy to temp.

if you have some temp T then to find out what happens at that temp you just multiply kT and that gives a tiny quantity of energy which is absolutely ubiquitous in things at that temp. It gets into everything----the infrared heat glow at that temp, the speed molecules move at that temp, the speed of sound, the behavior in a semiconductor chip at that temp. kT is totally amazing. the energy kT at some temperature is the real important thing about that temperature. For this to work the T must be measured on an absolute scale.


Well air is a mix of various molecules and there is an average mass M of an air molecule.

And dividing an energy by a mass always gives the square of a speed. (You see that in a lot of formulas including Einsteins famous E=mc^2, divide both sides by m and you have the square of a speed)

In this case look at (7/5) kT divided by M.

That is the square of a speed, and it is the speed of sound in air at temp T.

Apparently newton forgot the factor of 7/5 and he didnt have k and he didnt have molecular weight but he approached it in some roundabout fashion and got it somehow, so the story goes.