On 5/10/2010 9:36 AM, Mike Lazzari wrote:
>> For me the only comprehensible distance scale, circa 1/40000000 the
>> circumference of our planet ...
>>
> A rather esoteric, arbitrary starting point. Too bad the ivory tower crowd
> developed what could have been a very useful and logical system.
>
I'm not so sure about the use of logic in measurements. Aren't they all
essentially arbitrary? I'm not aware of any sort of fundamental source
for measurement. We can use atomic vibration for very accurate time
measurement standards, but there is nothing is absolute in length at the
atomic level. Well, maybe wavelengths of light. Is it time to turn
measurements on their head, counting up from infinitesimal? And if we
were cartoon characters, with three fingers and a thumb, wouldn't we
base a "rational" system on powers of six?
The old, sort of English system still in common use here makes a lot of
sense to me at the level of living personal life. An inch is the length
of the end part of my index finger, the span of the four fingers of my
hand is 6 in., my foot is about a foot long, elbow to fingertip is 18
in., the distance from nose to fingertip stretched out to the side is a
yard, and thus the span of my reach is two yards or six feet.
There is nothing about the metric system that has anything like the body
level sense of the old English system of measurement.
At larger scales of linear measurement, I don't much care except for
having an "feeling" from so many years of experience for the common
measure of miles and knowing from navigation how useful the nautical
mile is in relationship to the earth's size. "A mile a minute" is pretty
useful in latitude and equatorial longitude. Doesn't matter now with
GPS, I suppose.
The whole business of the metric system came as a part of the rampant
rationalism of the "Enlightenment" (Winners get to pick the names.)
Unfortunately for their claim to some sort of non-arbitrariness, their
estimate of the size of the Earth was quite a ways off. Read some
philosophy and natural philosophy of the times. There was a serious move
afoot to wholly deny all the non-rational aspects of humans and
"improve" them to artificial ideas of rationality.
If everything is better in decimal, why don't we have 10 hours days of
100 minutes each? Just sayin' :-)
If you keep up with what's happening in some sciences, including
physics, you might be aware of the claim by at lest one Nobel Laureate
in quantum physics of the death of Reductionism, one of the cornerstones
of Rationalism.
Two yards, but not two metres. Moose
--
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