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New Book Says The Meter Is all Wrong
Bill Klemm writes "Ken Alder's new book 'The Measure of All Things' scandalizes the metric system as 'arbitrary.' CNN has a little article about a new book that explores the 'odyssey' of Delambre and Mechain to find the perfect unit of measure."
0 degrees - the energy at which a hydrogen atom is at rest. 1 degree would be the energy at which hydrogen is one quantum state higher than rest.
1 length - the distance across 1 hydrogen atom
1 time unit - the time required for a hydrogen nucleus to vibrate once
Then you can apply whatever kind of metric multiples you like to these and voila, you are done.
Who cares about the actual size of the Meter. Of course it's arbitrary. All units of measurement are arbitrary....
All I want is a system that allows easy conversion to other units. None of this 2 cups to a quart; 4 quarts to a gallon, a dozen gallons to a bushel and a peck....
...And when that future failed to arrive I began to wonder why.
Because people had been using the imperial system for so long, it became (and still is) a major undertaking to convert. You don't just say "Okay everyone, we're going to use Metric for everything now!"..
There are books of formulas, constants, tables and charts that need to be rewritten. There are machines that need to be rebuilt and redesigned. There are entire conventions that need to be done away with and started afresh. This is extreamely difficult, costly and possibly dangerous to just 'do'.
Only in the more modern technologies has the metric system really taken hold, and everything else has been undergoing a gradual conversion.
The metric system has many advantages over the imperial system... like having destinct units for mass and force: grams and newtons as opposed to just 'pounds' (pound-mass, which must be converted to slugs for calculations, and pound-force). As well as not having any unweildy fractions. Non of that 15/32 of an inch.
However, that does not make the imperial system any less useful. If you really think about it, any measurement system is going to be arbitrary, and it will be valid as long as it's consistent.
=Smidge=
A quote:
"I remember my fifth-grade teacher instructing us in the metric system and telling us we would need to learn this material because we would all be using it in the future," he says. "I believed her, of course. And when that future failed to arrive I began to wonder why.
He should get a clue, the rest of the world uses the metric system, this future has materialized. If one country wants to be stubborn and hold out, whatever.
Anyhow, the real beauty of the metric system is that it's various units of measurements make sense. As in, a centimeter is a hundredth of a meter, a millimeter is a thousands of a meter, etc. The imperial system wouldn't be so strange if it was 10 inches to a foot, but it's not.
Anyhow, the meter is not the only part of the metric system, it also encompasses temperature, weight, etc. And the meter is certainly less arbitrary than the foot!
You'ld think at least NASA would get this.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
24 hours is a day discovered to be arbitrary. 100 pennies in a dollar discovered to be arbitrary. 4 quarts in a gallon discovered to be arbitrary. 67 trolls in a Slashdot article discovered to be arbitrary...
We have the hogshead, the dram, the cubit, the bushel, the gross, the furlong, and even the jigger. There's nothin' wrong with 'em by crackie!
How ya like dat?
Proper link
I think we should go with the time cube instead.
Cube proves you are stupid!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
We all knew this would be posted ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
In meters, for example, mathmeticians had to use a definition that allowed others acrossed the world to also come up with an exact length. If these mathemeticians truly wanted a non-arbitrary system back then, they could have made a "master meter stick", whose length was not based on anything arbitrary. But such a system would never work, because then they would have had to ship copies of the master meter stick across the world. The ratio system was much more practical.
Mass and volume are arbitarary in 2 ways. They rely off our arbitary meter, as well as the arbitary earth's gravity. A definition I've heard is that 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level weights 1 gram and has a volume of 1 mL. Try taking a cubic centimeter of water to a different world, and you'll get different measurements. Today, the official definition of a kilogram is the mass of an international prototype in the form of a platinum-iridium cylinder kept at Sevres in France. (By the way, you could also say that using water is also arbitrary, since we earthlings used a commonly found liquid. The sea level is also arbitrary, since it varies across different coasts, as well over time)
Temperature is also based off the arbitary earth's atmosphere. 0 degrees Celsius is the freezing point of water at 1 atm (the standard air pressure of earth). If you increase or decrease the pressure, you'll get different freezing points.
Anyways, my point is, that it was next to impossible to come up with a practical system without it being arbitrary in some way or another.
P.S. If anything in this article needs correction, please correct it. I'm probably wrong somewhere since everything I said was what I remember from years ago.
Yeah, what comes after "peta-"?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Man, I wish I could spend all day coming up with inane assertions and then writing books about it and getting paid for it.
Of course the meter is arbitrary! Until you get down to the quantum level EVERYTHING is arbitrary. That's the way the universe works!
Geez!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Of course water is an element. It is one of the four. Earth, Air, Fire and Water.
How ya like dat?
Blaming difficult divisions on a system of measurement is stupid. The reason the metric system is so easy is that it mixes with the base we use and we all use base 10.
All of those people arguing that metric is bad due to this difficult division need to realise the problem is base 10.
I will now announce my plan to improve the world. We move to base 12. "How to get there?" you ask. We convert 2 letters to numbers, but which 2.
I propose Q & X. X will be replaced by ECKS and Z where it is necessary. Q by KW, in Iraq is will be replaced by c, ck or maybe rc (Rhymes with arc). This will have several benefits, SEX ==> secks and is thus longer for everyone who speaks English. Keyboards also become smaller. 3 rows of 8, with the numerals stuffed somewhere (not sure about how to solve that).
On the numerical side we can now convince aliens we don't count on our fingers. It will also help to weed out the ignorant (who DO count on their fingers).
There are various benefits in terms of division.
All numbers are now reported in base 12, the numerals are as follows: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X
The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day. We have just decimalised time without significantly changing the base unit. Yeah. The metric system would remain the same, but things will all of course be done in base 12, allthe prefixes still work. I should add this scheme would have put off the millenium bug for about 1000 years. The only thing remaining nondecimal is the year, which short of altering the flight path of the earth will have to remain as is. Of course there are now 275 days or 276 in a year.
Regretfully 5 is no longer a nice number, nor is 10. The only reason we use these though is as our base is 10. Log_10 is now useless, but we add in log_12. Multiplication is easier, i think, I'm not sure of the patterns, but I'm sure multiplication by 3 and 4 is a lot nice. 6 becomes like 5 and is funky. There should be a pattern for 9 and 11 becomes as easy as 9 is currently. 13 is also really easy to multiply by.
Another drawback is that maths will be forced to find a new name for the arbitrary variable. Variables can't just be set to X, that would not work. The multiplaction system should also probably be changed. * could work.
The ultimate plus though is that there are now 20 letters, that respects our base people, beautiful.
I hope you all enjoy that.
Now it's exactly 299792458 m/s. Nothing arbitrary about that at all.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"A bunch of very angry pet lovers. =)
This sig no verb.
Multiplied by 2, divided by 2.
I'll stake my cat this is in use already.
Not that it's relevant, but...
Which is heavier? a pound of feathers, or a pound of lead?
.
.
.
The pound of feathers is heavier!
Lead, being a metal, is measured in avurdupois weight; feathers, not being metal, is measured in imperial weight. Differences between an avurdupois pound and an imperial pound, mean that one pound of feathers is heavier!
bits and peace
Nicholas Daley
I just read this book a few days ago. The author is turning molehills into mountains.
According to the book, if Mechain had gotten his numbers right, the meter should have been longer by 2 mm. That's right, just two millimeters.
The researchers measured the width of a continent to within 0.2% of the correct value, using 18th-century equipment, in conditions that were far from ideal. (You try carrying survey equipment across a national border during a war, and see how much work you get done.) We should be impressed that they got as close as they did.
0 degrees - the energy at which a hydrogen atom is at rest. 1 degree would be the energy at which hydrogen is one quantum state higher than rest.
By saying "degrees" I take it you are referring to temperature... but energy is NOT the same thing as temperature, even though they are often linked. I believe you're thinking of something more along the lines of electron-volts (eV). The "volt" is what you'd need to re-define in order to normalize your energy scale with respect to this bound electron.
However, some people might find that saying "the nearest gas station is about 1x10^15 distances away" a tad bit inconvenient. Atoms are pretty "fuzzy" anyway so the only length you can go by is the bohr radius, which is an oversimplification of the actual probalistic structure of a hydrogen atom. But if we want to develop units from the atomic scale, wouldn't it be better to define length as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during the time it takes hydrogen to "vibrate" once?
As for the hydrogen's rest energy, well that is essentially defined by its mass (times speed of light squared). So maybe it's better to define a hydrogen atom as having a mass unit of 1 and then derive energy from that.
Hmmm.... wait a minute, hydrogen is just a proton and an electron. Electrons have negligible mass compared to a proton. Why don't we just call the mass of a proton "1 mass unit," that makes more sense because the proton is even more fundamental than hydrogen.
If you think that's the best idea, then you're in luck, because that unit of measure has already been invented! The atomic mass! Well, sort of, since a proton has an atomic mass of 1.0073, and when you add the atomic mass of an electron, you get a value slightly higher than the atomic mass of the whole hydrogen atom... damn it. So really, no matter what you do, it's hard to define units that are completely "fundamental." So might as well just make them in terms of stuff that humans can understand, like feet, stones, and most importantly, imperial pints.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
It's all a matter of units.
Energy is measured in units of force x distance. Force is measured in units of mass x acceleration (Newton's second law!), acceleration is velocity per unit time, and velocity (or speed) is distance per unit time. Putting this all together, we see that energy E has units of
mass x distance^2 / time^2
while m has units of mass, and c has units of distance/time. So the equation E=mc^2 makes sense no matter what you pick the units to be.
In SI units, mass is measured in kilograms, distance is in meters, time is in seconds, so speed of light is in meters/second. Energy is measured in kilograms-square-meters-per-square-second, more commonly known as Joules.
If we were to use light seconds and seconds, then the speed of light would be 1, but then energy would be measured in kilograms-square-light-seconds-per-square-second, which is a truly humungous amount of energy (about 10^17 Joules, which is about the same energy released by about 10 megatons of TNT, give or take an order of magnitude). So yes, the "E" in "E=mc^2" would now be tiny because c was 1, but because E is now measured in megatons of TNT the energy is still the same impressive amount. :-)