# Tag Info

10

I'd like to add a bit more to Adam Davis's concise answer. Newton's Sphere Production Method Firstly, note that the lathing process shown in The video that Adam Davis's Answer links to with the sphere rotated and an oscillating abrasive cup sliding over its surface about pseudo-random rotation axes is the standard technique invented by Isaac Newton that ...

6

Another reason that nobody David Richerby mentioned in a comment, is durability. The corner of a cube would be easy to accidentally break because a small force on it would equate to a large pressure (its area gets smaller as the shape of the cube gets more accurate). In fact I think it would be likely to break during machining, resulting in truncated corners ...

53

If you know the diameter of the sphere, you know everything you need to know about the dimensions. It all comes down to one single value. Any other shape requires multiple dimensions and thus multiple values. Further, measuring a cube or another shape for accuracy is harder than measuring a sphere. Making very accurate spheres is not as difficult as you ...

30

There is a nice article in the New Scientist that describes how these spheres were made. Sphere can be made very precisely (and their shape measured accurately) simply because of their symmetry - and therefore their volume can be determined most accurately. The video clip in the above article shows this in detail. Of course a sphere also has the lowest ...

4

A sphere might be harder to machine, but easiest to verify the accuracy of, especially when accounting for slight changes due to temperature. It should be noted that any standard like this must not only have a mass of 1 kg (or whatever) but also have some secondary method of verifying mass, in this case, being able to count (to some accuracy) the number of ...

3

You could do that, but if you did, you'd best not call the new unit "meter" in order to avoid confusion. That is why we don't define the meter as the length traveled during 1/300 000 000 th of a second, for instance: such a definition would cause confusion with older precision measurements that used previous definitions of the meter. You can only ...

1

You are entirely correct: when assigning JD real numbers to UTC calendar dates, it is simply impossible to name any moment during the leap second — while an analog rendering of a UTC time can say “23:59:60.25”, the JD will provide no name for any moment of that entire second. This can be seen if you visit the standard JPL HORIZONS system: ...

-1

The whole notion of "fundamental units" is bogus, physics can be formulated in a purely dimensionless way. Given any set of equations, you are free to define new variables by e.g. introducing arbitrary scaling constants. This then allows you to study certain scaling limits of the theory. E.g. starting from special relativity (formulated in natural units), ...

0

Light years help give an idea of distances through space and time. When we look at a star 100 light years away, that 100 light years not only gives an idea of the immense distance to the object but will also tell us that what we see is light from 100 years in the past.

0

Ultimately, the answer boils down to convenience. When we want to describe the distance between here and, for instance, the star Sirius (the brightest star in our night sky), it would be a little cumbersome to write $\ell=8.13\times10^{18}\,{\rm cm}$ any time we want to write its distance from us. And really this goes for any astronomical object: they're ...

1

Whenever you see things at a distance, your perceptions are of things that happened in the past. You can see it at a football game, for example, where someone kicking the ball is seen very much before it is heard (sound is slower than light). Light only has a finite speed, too; and light turns out to be the fastest thing there is. A light year is the ...

Top 50 recent answers are included