On Tue, 26 Mar 2002 16:17:17 M R wrote: ... >Whether you say 5 liters or 5000 cubic centimeters, a >person can understand that both are same. > 'Course! That's why this issue of whether people should be using cL, mL or cm, etc, does not concern me one bit. IMHO we should be flexible enough to tolerate such differences.
>But between 2 kWh and 7.2 Megajoules (1 kWh = 3.6 >megajoules), definitely there will be a confusion. >The reason is 1 hour = 3600 seconds and not 100 or >1000 seconds. > >On 1 side, our SI lovers believe that we should switch >over to joule (thereby eliminating hours), and on >other side the entire world is using kWh, MWh, GWh & >TWh making watt-hour the only unit of electricity. > There is simply NO question in my mind that kWh and the likes should simply be abandoned. If we are defending our *current* SI system and framework, such units MUST go. It may be difficult for some to create familiarity with the joule, but it's perfectly feasible to do it! >According to SI >"The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods >of radiation corresponding to the transition between 2 >hyperfine levels of the ground state of caesium 133 >atom. " > I guess the source of the problem here, Madan, is that you're using a deprecated definition of the second. This is no longer how the s has being defined. It's now the distance travelled by the speed of light in a certain fraction of a second (as much as I believe that this change was a huge mistake *conceptually*, we're stuck with it for a while! All fundamental units should be defined in terms of *the physical entity it tries to define/describe*. In this particular case the use of another base unit, the second, for the definition of the meter is totally contrary to that principle. But that's the subject for another discussion... :-) ). ... >So 1 day will contain 86.4 kiloseconds and 1 year will >contain 31,557 kiloseconds. I believe 1 of our members >suggested kiloseconds earlier. > Hmm... I'm still wrestling with this. Until we find a better way to reckon time, we should leave these ideas, like the ks and others, alone IMHO. And I thank you, Madan, for providing a sensible ammunition for that in your paragraph below. ... >Beware - the decimal time based on Earth's rotation is >becoming popular. Its very easy for people to >remember that 1 unit of time = 1/1000 part of a day. >The entire world of governments, banking, industry, >education, sports, etc will jump on this new unit >leaving SI unit of time (second) in trouble and >science will >become mockery.... >I apologise for mocking the definition of SI unit of >time - SECOND. > No need to apologize, Madan. Indeed, this is perhaps the last bastion of stone age concept that we'll need to address. I'm just praying and hoping that technology will reach such a stage that we may utlimately be able to redefine it without much of a hassle (yes, its duration *itself*) accommodating it, evidently, to a decimal framework, in however shape or form one cares to design it. The only problem is that we may not find a way to circumvent the fact that there are 365.xx days in a year... :-S Marcus See Dave Matthews Band live or win a signed guitar http://r.lycos.com/r/bmgfly_mail_dmb/http://win.ipromotions.com/lycos_020201/splash.asp
