6 ms·
It's a shame that we entered the era of precision a century or so before we got some good science. We could have chosen so many different, cooler distance unit
by saalweachter 2y ago
It's a shame that we entered the era of precision a century or so before we got some good science.
We could have chosen so many different, cooler distance units than "one ten-millionth the distance between the North Pole and the equator, on a line passing through Paris". We could have chosen 1 nano-lightsecond! We could have chosen the wavelength of the hydrogen line! We had options, but we didn't even know them in 1800.
Avogadro's number is about 3% off from 24!. Instead of defining our mole as the number of carbon-12 atoms equal in weight to 12 cubes of water each one-billionth the distance between the North Pole and the equator, on a line passing through Paris, on a side, we could have defined it as 4!!! Imagine telling that to aliens when explaining our standard units, they'd be so jealous they'd convert on the spot.
- legitster 2y agoMore importantly, we missed a real opportunity to switch to a base-12 number system.
- BitwiseFool 2y agoNow we have to wait for the French to have another revolution.
- dredmorbius 2y agoLiberté, égalité, duodecimilité!
- arlort 2y agoAnd for people to start growing 6 fingers per hand instead of 5
- saalweachter 2y agoDuodecimal also has a connection to counting on your fingers. You've got twelve finger bones/joints. Move your thumb from one to the next as you increment your count. Bampf, base twelve, no extra fingers needed.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoInstead of having Avogadro's number at all, chemists could just count using numbers like we do for everything else. We already have the prefixes to make 10^+/-24 easy. No need to re-define it, just stop using it. It's nothing more than a conversion factor between two parallel unit systems that somehow both coexist within SI.
- Ekaros 2y agoAvogadro's number is for making calculations including weight simpler. If I have x grams of carbon how many grams of oxygen I need to burn it all. And then how many grams of carbon dioxide I end up with. Value is somewhat arbitrary. And could also be tied to some other isotope. It is really about the ratios between all the elements including their isotopes. Picking carbon and there of isotope C-12, and saying this is exactly 12 grams is not unreasonable selection.
- saalweachter 2y agoAnd now that we actually know how big particles are, we could work the other direction [if restandarizing an industrialized civilization wasn't impossible] -- pick an arbitrary number of particles that is a nice number for some reason or another (eg, 4!!), take the simplest thing that has mass (monatomic hydrogen), and declare your unit of mass to be equal to 4!! hydrogen atoms. Sure, it's not easy for a primitive scientist to take a box of an exact number of hydrogen atoms and weigh them, but any advanced civilization should know exactly what a hydrogen atom masses.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoThat system would last only as long as nobody wanted any more precision than you could get from measuring hydrogen atoms. Then they're do what they've always done and redefine it to something uglier but which can be measured more accurately. > any advanced civilization should know exactly what a hydrogen atom masses. Nobody can know that exactly. Just giving it a name isn't the same as knowing it. We already have a name for it - "the mass of a hydrogen atom".