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Posted by James [Email] (more from James) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:03:35 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: For all intents and purposes it is *not* (also long), AeroBaron, Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:45:01
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I suppose the statement "time is metricized" is open to some interpretation, as like you say, days, years etc are not decimal based, and those are used in "metric" countries... but the second is an SI unit. In fact, it is one of the most fundamental SI units. For example, the metre, is defined by the second and the speed of light: a second is defined by a primary frequency standard (eg a cesium clock) which is then compared (successively) to an optical frequency standard (usually a frequency stabilized laser), which can then be used to measure length through interferometry. This works much better than comparing an object to the length of somebody's shoe! Even if that shoe was housed in an ultrastable, temperature controlled environment, it would be many many orders of magnitude more unstable in length than is required in engineering + science. Basically one needs to compare to stable things like atomic transitions rather than unstable things like orbits of planets etc.

(yes, years ago, I worked in a group at a standards lab, and one of the group's objectives was to develop primary optical frequency standards... that lab btw, regularly got phone calls from people angry about the metric system! even 20 years after the government (not the lab) made the switch!!)

All that said, at times, it is advantageous not to use the metric system. Carpentry is a good example. The level of precision required is generally very low (in mechanical engineering terms) because wood is soft + it moves so much with environmental changes. That + the fact that commonly available material comes in imperial units (even here in Canada), makes it stupid to use metric for almost any woodworking (the exceptions are MDF and baltic birch)... and I have occasionally watched people try + convert everything into metric + it's awful to watch! Lots of mechanical engineering is done in imperial (whether metal work or circuit board parts), but even there, people talk of thou's, not 64ths of an inch! And a lot of that is for legacy reasons + to interface with the USA...

James...

posted by 67.158.7...

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