Re: [Phys-l] frequency: a modest proposal

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

> On 02/02/2010 07:45 AM, Edmiston, Mike wrote:
> > John Denker suggested saying "cycles per second" rather than "per
> > second" if frequency is what we are talking about.  I would presume
> > we would also say "radians per second" rather than "per second" if
> > angular frequency is what we are talking about.
>
> Agreed.  (The only reason I emphasized the Hz example
> is that it is where this thread started, and it is
> the problem child on the NIST web page.  It is not
> a particularly special case.)

Of course one should actually go whole hog.  So wavelength would be m/wave
or m/cycle.  If one actually explicitly puts in these objects, then when you
get the end result things should cancel or the necessary conversions should
be obvious.  So if you get cycle/radian you know what to do.

The view of units as just telling you the dimensions may be a bit narrow.
So one could include all objects rather than just commonly spatial, mass,
and time dimensions.

This might help students quite a lot by typing all numbers to appropriate
units.  So if you are given 2m as a measurement why not be much more
specific and say 2m/person-height so now you know exactly what it means.
Then of course the next advance would be to have calculators and programs
that handle units of this sort so they could do some modest checking for
you.  Of course there is always the distinction between work and torque, but
I suspect a suitable notation could be worked out.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX