Thursday, October 16, 2014

units - Is there a simple way to represent this concept?



If something is represented in meters per second, it means the object is changing by x amount of meters every y amount of seconds. But when you have a unit of something similar to, "Meters · Seconds," what exactly does this mean logically?



Answer




Say you grow bananapples in your tropical garden. Bananapples are continuously produced by bananapple trees. All your trees are disposed along a 100 meter long line. Say it takes one week to get 100 kilograms of mature bananapples from your trees.


Now you can go to the market and sell your bananapples for 10 euros the $km.hour$


Indeed 100 $meters$ times 604800 $seconds$ (that's a week) is equivalent to 100 $kilograms$ which means that saying you have 1 $kilogram$ of bananapples is the same as saying you have the production of 604800 $m.s$, that is the amount produced after 604800 $seconds$ by one $meter$ of your aligned trees. Then, if I get the math right, 1 $km.h$ is equivalent to 5.95 $grams$ (yes, bananapples are expensive; that's because you do not eat them, you smoke the leaves).


So: what the unit means depends on what you are talking about. What it is proportional to.


No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...