Pat McBride wrote:
Daniel, are you serious?????????? Last time I checked, the attraction of a
body to the earth -mass- by the force of gravity is pretty well constant.
There may be variations around the earth, but they are probably minor.
A suggestion -- when you have breakfast next, drop a slice of buttered toast
on the floor. Weigh the toast before dropping, and record the weight
divided by the force of gravity where you are. This will give you it's
mass. Then drop the toast on the floor. Record the time it takes for about
20 trials, also recording the number of times it lands butter side up. This
will approximate the level of frustration of anyone having breakfast with
you (wife, mother, girlfriend, dog, etc.)
If you have any dogs such as my two, the recovery rate by the dog can be
measured in milliseconds. I therefore suggest that you restrain any and all
pets, spouses, relatives, and so on while conducting the experiment.
LOL, LOL
Pat McBride
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 2008/05/21 01:33
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [social] I am not receiving anything from this list
Daniel Carrera wrote:
Rod Engelsman wrote:
But if, as you say, a second and a metre are related that way it would
have to be an incredible coincidence.
I've tried to double-check, but I can't find a source. I calculated the
period of a 1-metre pendulum and I got 2.0064 seconds. So a single swing
of the pendulum would be 1.0032 seconds. That error, while small, seems
hard to explain by anything other than assuming that the definition of a
second was never a metre and that this is all one big coincidence.
Aha! I have confirmed that this is actually a coincidence. On a page
about the history of the metric system, talking about the metre, it says:
"... there were two favoured approaches to the definition of the
standard unit of length. The suggestion of defining the metre as the
length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second suffered from the
problem of varying gravity, giving a "metre" of 99 cm in Mexico City,
but 99.5 cm in Helsinki. The other approach suggested defining the metre
as one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth's meridian along a
quadrant, that is the distance from the equator to the north pole."
So... the metre is *not* related to the second, but they thought about
it. And we can see why it can't be related because gravity is not
constant around the Earth (btw, Canada also has low gravity, so one way
to lose weight is to move to Canada :D ).
Daniel.
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You also have to factor in "Murphy's Law of Unequal Gravitation
Attraction" ;-)
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