Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 10:36:44 +0100 From: Colin Stamp <colinnospamp.plus.com> Subject: Re: Town And Country Miles
On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 06:54:59 GMT, Malcolm William Mason <mwm1(delete)nospamedu> wrote: >Just like a good old dyne only very much bigger. one dyne accelerates >one gram one cm. per secnd per second. >And that is from a loooooong time ago! > >>Thus a lump of 1 kilo _mass_ (NB) on Earth exerts a _force_ (NB) >>downward due to Earth's gravity of roughly 9.807 newtons. > >But weighs one kilo (kilogram) correct? > >And is Newton not capitalized as in Sir Isaac? I can never remember that one. > >>Physicists and designers of machinery prefer to be very careful >>when saying words such as "kilo", "newton", "mass" and "force". > >And weight.? I think they try to avoid "weight" altogether. It's a really nasty ambiguous word which can be taken to mean "mass" or "gravitational force" depending on who's using it. There might be an official meaning for it, but it's so widely mis-used that it's practically useless. > > >Blokes heaving on spanners here on Earth can get by with saying >that 1 newton of force == 1 kilo of force. No. It's a bit less than a tenth of that. Cheers, Colin.