ElM, you are obviously not as precise as you think you are and don't know that a metre is NOT an absolute: <So, a meter has 100cm. I use it as a yards stick. It is not relative. It is absolute. (In 1983, it was redefined by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) as the distance travelled by light in free space in 1/299,792,458 of a second.) We Latino like precision we don't use pieces of the human body to measure things, which is an Anglo stuff. >
A metre is defined by light moving a metre and how long it takes. But that metre which is used to measure how far the light traveled is measured by, oh, that's odd, the metre which it is going to measure. Okay, let's go with that. So, what's that other thing, the "second" which you are going to use to measure the metre? A second is how long it takes a photon to travel a certain number of those metres you are going to measure. But wait a minute, we haven't measured that metre yet. So the second which you want to use is defined again by the thing which you plan on measuring. That's like you using your arm to measure how long your arm is. What a surprise, it's one arm long.
But then, it gets worse. If you measure the metre [or your arm] when going really, really, really fast, meaning nearly as fast as light can go, you'll find that the length goes all elastic and isn't the same length as your other arm which you could leave back at base. But, oddly, when you get back to base and compare your two arms, you find one has got older than the other. So your seconds have gone all wrong too.
But wait, there's more. That is if you don't mess around with gravity. But if you tried all that when the cosmos was just being born, you'd find your seconds, metres, kilograms and speed of light would go all to hell and everything would become totally amorphous. You would have no idea how big anything was and it would look enormous and totally bewildering. You'd need some serious numeracy skills to figure it out. Best to give up at this stage and go back to gawping at girls and bolting base stations together - that looks sort of real.
Mqurice |
