Planck units

[pne]

*snicker* Just found this page on Everything2 to do with "Planck units".

Why use kilograms? Why pounds? They're all pretty arbitrarily defined. But some constants are given (e.g. the speed of light in a vacuum, the gravitational constant "big-gee", etc.) so one could derive "logical" units from those.

Their order of magnitude may not be very useful without scaling them up or down, but ... well, read the write-up.

Comments

[timwi.livejournal.com]

For some reason, even some of the arbitrarily chosen units seem to have unuseful orders of magnitude, which is why we most common talk about a decibel or a millirem...

Unfortunately, I can't seem to connect to this server (www.everything2.com). If I remove the 2, I get a 404.

[pne.livejournal.com]

True, or picofarads.

And yes, it is www.everything2.com, and it works for me right now... strange.

[timwi.livejournal.com]

The link works for me now.

[pne.livejournal.com]

By the way, some people are also fond of the furlong-firkin-fortnight system of measurements :)

(And there's the saying that Pi seconds are a nanocentury, which is fairly close... and one professor supposedly gave the average length of his lectures as a microcentury -- i.e., about 53 minutes.)