Timeline for How to correctly show units with a vector?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 2, 2011 at 19:14 | vote | accept | John Alexiou | ||
| Jan 13, 2011 at 22:44 | comment | added | Marek | @jalexiou: sorry, I didn't notice you are not an author of this answer. In that case, I don't know why you think $c = 1$ is not implied :-) | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 22:42 | comment | added | Marek | @jalexiou: then you should make that clear. I thought $c = 1$ is implied ;-) | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 19:26 | comment | added | John Alexiou | The 4-vector above is a block-vector, with 1 time + 3 position quantities. Those do not behave like regular vectors because you cannot get a magnitude out of them without a non-scalar metric (as mentioned elsewhere correctly). In a pure sense a vector has to have the same units, although when it comes to SI prefixes it get complicated like (1 μm,1 km,1 ly) ?? | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 19:00 | comment | added | David Z | Although technically you're right about units, in that it is possible to perform well-defined operations on vectors in which the components have different units, it's a major pain in the butt when you're working with linear transformations. It also requires you to introduce a non-identity metric to take the inner product. So in practice usually we normalize the units so that they're the same on all components. | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 18:54 | history | edited | TROLLHUNTER | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
added 12 characters in body
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| Jan 13, 2011 at 18:43 | history | answered | TROLLHUNTER | CC BY-SA 2.5 |