On Sun, 2014-02-23 at 13:21 +0530, gabin kattukaran wrote: > I'm trying to get my head around that as well. I suspect that it is > only a matter of perspective but standing on my head is not helping > (as yet.)
LOL. Might be easier if you lived in Australia. Or Argentina maybe. I am reaching the end of my own knowledge of maths and physics - subjects that I did study (again and again) till a few years ago as long as it was necessary to help my children with schoolwork - and even those times are receding fast. I vaguely, very vaguely, recall some facts that I read in my son's physics (or was it maths) textbook about 5 years ago. It was this business of units and these little absurd details like how "liters per 100 km actually ends up being a unit of area. The figure is an area, mathematically simply because it is length^3/length. But the relevant answer is not an area, it is a volume. If a car needs 6 liters for 100 km, it could be expressed as a unit of area in which case it would be 0.00000006 square meters. Someone correct me if that figure is wrong because the calculation is as follows 1 liter = 0.1 ^ 3 = 0.001 cubic meters 6 liters = 0.006 cubic meters 100 km = 100,000 meters 0.006/100,000 = 0.00000006 square meters. I wonder if that is the cross sectional area of a molecule of petrol - a worthless piece of information. Seems too big actually. A column of petrol 0.00000006 sq meters in area but 100 km long would be several thousand molecules thick - because that translates to 0.06 square millimeters - a huge area. Something is seriously wrong - either my calculation, or the real world significance of the figure In actual fact the unit that is useful is only the numerator - i.e 6 liters, not the result of the calculation. shiv
