From: Dan W. (danw_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-01-09 17:28:01
Kevin Lynch wrote:
> 3) From a fundamental physics standpoint, length and time are "the same
> thing", in a rigorous sense, since special relativity relates them, and
> in many applications to particle physics, you would want them to have
> the same dimensionality, because they do. Ditto mass and energy ...
> energy is no longer a derived unit, but has the same fundamental
> dimension as mass. And it happens to have the same units as inverse
> length..... so this case also shows that different physical dimensions
> can have the same units in certain problem domains.
And if in some domains,
(wave)length^(-1) == energy == mass
then perhaps is not so much what "unit system" a particular unit should
be a member of, --which to me is a useless membership in the first
place, since I would not care to respect any particular 'system' in my
programming--, as much as what domain it is currently a member of,
which, unlike a unit system, has *semantic* meaning.