4 ms·

This is definitely weird, it'd be like saying 79% of a meter instead of just 0.79m lol

• dylan604 3y ago
  but it's not wrong though. that's like saying you can't say 20% off and must provide the exact discount in whatever monetary unit you prefer.
  • anentropic 3y ago
    it's not the same if you think about it a bit more an equivalent monetary example would be describing something which costs 79 cents as costing "79% of a dollar" sounds weird no?
    • dylan604 3y ago
      we say half the speed of light, we don't say 149,896,229m/s LHC uses terms like 90% speed of light to be more specific example i guess it all depends on what circles you do or do not float in.
      • anentropic 3y ago
        Equally, we never say "50% of a m/s" instead of "0.5m/s" And notations like 0.9c are also quite commonly used for velocities close to the speed of light (the LHC tends to use TeV more often as a unit, which corresponds to a certain velocity for protons, but they mainly care about the energy) But using percentages with the speed of light makes some sense because it marks one end of an absolute scale, there is no way to go 1.1c or 2.5c. So using a percentage emphasises how close we are to the maximum value. But the same doesn't apply to AU.
        • iso1631 3y ago
          0.9AU, 0.9C, 0.9 Parsecs, 0.9 miles, all make sense half an AU, half the speed of light, half a parsec, half a mile, again fine 90% of an AU, 90% of the speed of light, 90% of a parsec, 90% of a mile. That sounds odd.