5 ms·
> At 8km down, they are experiencing more than 80 megapascals, or 800 times the pressure at the ocean surface. Is this somewhat a coincidence or is this the be
by Waterluvian 4y ago
> At 8km down, they are experiencing more than 80 megapascals, or 800 times the pressure at the ocean surface.
Is this somewhat a coincidence or is this the beauty of the metric system?
- dakial1 4y agoThis is rounding. 8km would actually be 80304.7 kPa. So not as beautiful as you imagine.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI’m guessing the salinity of the water might affect the pressure?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 4y agoPossibly offset by the volume of fish.
- elorant 4y agoEvery ten meters pressure raises by one atmosphere. So I'd say it's just a coincidence.
- Ekaros 4y agoI think it is just that gravity happens to be 9,81 m/s^2. On other hand 1kg being equal to 1 litre of water is by design in metric system. Other happens stance is that pressure on surface is about 101 325 pascals. So things work out that way...
- fredley 4y agoI'm reasonably sure they're not identically accurate any more, but good enough for the kitchen. The kg was initially defined by the mass of the water, but as the kg has been redefined it's drifted a tiny bit.
- red_trumpet 4y agoI guess in this context the more significant factor is that seawater has a slightly higher density than pure water.
- morjom 4y agoApparently the "new" kg (based on meter and second) is within 30 ppm (parts-per-notation, TIL) of mass of 1 litre of water.
- fredley 4y agoLike I said, good enough for cooking!
- amelius 4y agoThose factors of 10 don't really look so nice if you use e.g. the binary number system.
- ralph84 4y agoIndeed. And the SI defining constants are downright ugly.
- lostlogin 4y agoYes, give me chains, barley corns and furlongs so that we have nice folksy constants.
- ralph84 4y agoThe supposed beauty of SI comes from (most) people having 10 fingers, so it has its folksy component. But SI doesn’t work well with computers and its defining constants are ridiculously ugly and inaccessible. SI is no less outdated than those units, but we hold onto it for backwards compatibility.
- Aardwolf 4y agoPerhaps humanity should have chosen base 12 (or, of course, base 16) at end of 18th century. With base 12 SI units at least some argument for imperial units would be gone, that is that some of their ratios are easy fractions. Not that this makes sense since the ratios of different imperial units are different random numerical values, and nothing prevents using fraction notation with metric units