Re: pound mass and pound force

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> Am  I the only oldtimer to remember pound as a unit of mass with the
> associated unit of force being poundal?

No, and I remember the slug, too, as a mass unit associated with the pound.
I've now moved to a country where the slug ought to be the national bird,
however, and I've never seen one quite that big.

> Perhaps physics should take the leads of biology and chemistry and avoid
> the use of common everyday words like mass and force and instead use Latin
> or some other language for the physics concepts.

In the perverted sense of the word which arose in the fifties, don't you
think that would further alienate people toward physics?

> And if we really want to be consistent we should have a name for the SI
> unit of mass that is not based on the cgs--I speak with tongue firmly in
> cheek.  What really irritates me is SI's desire to introduce unneeded names
> for units such as the Pascal and the Hertz and the Siemens.

I'm with you 100%. The silliest of all, however, is the becquerel. It is
one inverse second, just like the hertz, applied elsewhere. The political
forces which drove the international standards making committees to such
absurd exterems have also left perfectly good units (like the curie)
behind, together with the deserving folks who lost their eponymous
immortality. Another silly piece of politics was recently rectified when
Glen Seaborg, who discovered a lot of them, had his name restored to a
transuranic element.

Astronomy provides my ideal model. Astronomers don't change their
conventions over periods as long as millenia! The result of such
regressive behaviour is that the literature of astronomy is accessible
clear back to the old guys like Hipparchus.

Leigh