4 ms·
> Eg angular momentum and energy have the same units of Newton * metre, but adding them up is not recommended. The unit of angular momentum is kg.m^2.s^-1, you
by jjk166 2y ago
> Eg angular momentum and energy have the same units of Newton * metre, but adding them up is not recommended.
The unit of angular momentum is kg.m^2.s^-1, you're thinking of torque. Although even then we distinguish the Newton meter (Nm) from the Joule (J) even if they have the same dimensionality.
- eru 2y agoThanks, yes, I meant torque. Well, 1 J = 1 Nm, the differentiation you mention only helps humans a bit, but would be really hard to make work for a computer.
- jjk166 2y agoI don't think it would be too difficult for a computer to handle. We already deal with situations like float(1) = int(1), it doesn't seem any harder to handle torque(1) = energy(1).
- eru 2y agoThe problem is that you want torque not being equal to energy. Specifically you have: torque = force * distance energy = force * distance The only difference being that in the former the farce is perpendicular to the distance, and in the latter it's in line with the distance. A vector based system could distinguish the two, but you don't always want to deal with vectors in your computations. (And I'm fairly sure there are problems where even using vectors ain't enough to avoid this problem.)