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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (19923)	1/30/2008 9:56:47 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 36921

SI is easier, but it is pretty easy to keep the units straight in any system. Energy and Work ALWAYS have equivalent units in ANY system. A given system may have several different names, which differ by scale factors, but they will work out to have equivalent units of time, mass, distance, etc. You will never find that one has 1/s and another has 1/s2 for example. No can do. The differences are simply that one system measures distance in feet while another uses meters (or in the case of cgs, centimeters) etc, which is simply a constant factor difference. What you can NEVER do is convert distance to time, etc. The big problem with the English system is the confusion between mass/weight/force as used by many people who are sloppy. If people always used lbm and lbf it would be clearer. The other bad thing with the English system is that mechanics units are full of the acceleration of gravity as a constant due to this confusion in defining the mass/force constants. SI does not have that thank goodness. People have created different systems by picking some fundamental values (electron volt for charge, etc) as unity, and then making other things acquire whatever scale factors are needed. It can be kind of religious I guess. Some people swear by CGS (Centimeter, Gram, Second) vs MKS (Meter, Kilogram, Second) for this reason. They are both much better than dealing with Slugs from my POV!

To: maceng2 who wrote (19923)	1/31/2008 5:45:36 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 36921

Having grown up in an era of pounds, shillings, pence, guineas, pounds, ounces, furlongs, acres, gallons, bushels, inches, feet, yards, miles, knots, Fahrenheit, slugs, poundals, pints, quarts, stones, hundred weight, calories, horse power and books of logarithms to do engineering calculations, I can assure you you are very right: <Complex calculations in anything but SI units would be a big headache imho. > Calculators hadn't been invented. Mqurice