Knowing very little about chemistry and physics, I always enjoy learning the names of new measurements.
Milliangstroms? Lmao great name.
Milliangstroms? Lmao great name.
It is also called a "resonant structure" as the double bonds are said to flip in the ring of carbon atoms.
...or, at least, that was what I heard in high school organic chemistry. That was a very long time ago, and interpretations might have changed.
But that's my layman's knowledge. I'd like to be corrected!
Superposition of two states is not preserved by measurement: it's more akin to a (complex, not real) probability you'll find the system of one of the states.
By contrast, resonant bonds are a real mixing of the two states: you don't observe the carbon-carbon bonds in a benzene molecule as either being a single bond or a double bond, you observe them as a uniform bond that's somewhere between a single bond and a double bond (e.g., bond length). Treating such things as a weighted average of various resonance structures is a usable approximation that allows you to predict the structure of more molecules without having to dive deep into molecular orbital theory.
But seriously, SI already has appropriate units for these quantities. Milliangstroms should be converted to picometres, millimetres of mercury should be converted to kilopascals, kilotons of TNT should be converted to terajoules, and light-years should be converted to petametres.
(that's about 38.6 days for the curious)
Just because they're pretty, here's a link to the SDO gallery: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/main
Also, the SDO takes an image through each filter as it rotates through the filter wheel, IIRC, it takes 15 minutes to rotate through them all. They are then made available for each filter at different resolutions. Being the hacker-ish type, I wrote a script to use curl to download the image sequences for chosen filter/framesize for the sun's full rotation to create a one day timelapse.
When you have a jumble of units, it is hard to relate them. If an acre of land gets an inch of rain, how many gallons of water is that? If you did this in millimetres, metres, and cubic metres, it is easy.
If your car's motor is rated in horsepower but electricity is measured in kilowatts, how do you compare those?
What about fitting copies of a product measured in ounces in a shipping container measured in short tons?
Typesetting measured in points, but paper measured in inches?
Fitting metalwork done in mils but woodwork done in binary-fraction inches in a house measured in feet?
The list goes on and on. It's easy to say "but my domain is special and deserves its own units". It's much harder to resist and say no, there is a perfectly suitable unit with power-of-1000 prefixes to use in your application.
I disagree with this one. A ton of TNT is much more easily understood vs some measurement of energy that no normal human has any capacity of understanding.
Also, milliangstroms vs picometers. if you are already using angstroms, then dividing it by milli makes sense.
From here: https://unsaferguard.org/un-saferguard/blast-damage-estimati...
26 meters fatal distance, 83 or 142 meters buildings destroyed
My estimates are more appropriate for a 20-30 ton explosion, it seems.
Here the use of milliangstroms easily conveys the information that bond lengths are measured in angstroms and thus this is a very small correction, picometers would not convey that to anyone not already familiar with typical bond lengths.
Angstroms are needless jargon because nanometres already cover roughly the same scale. Do you want to go back to the bad old days when every town had its own definition of feet and pounds, and consumers were routinely cheated through the use of confusing and obfuscated units?
Your claim that I'm only advocating these units because they're common in media is ignoring the fact that these are also very common as formal units in their respective fields. Another great example is AU, no one has seen what 1AU exactly is, but everyone can intuitively understand that 5AU means 5x further from the Sun than the Earth is, 0.74 terameters conveys absolutely nothing on its own and even for someone who is aware that 1AU=0.15 terameters, it takes a bit of extra mental effort to obtain the same information while not really adding anything because '1AU=0.15 terameters' is fundamental knowledge in the field anyway.
This is not going back to the old days of units for two big reasons, they have important meaning within their field and there is widespread knowledge of conversion factors. Normalized units are also very popular in physics as they simplify the math and are more intuitive due to being directly tied to physical properties.
Hell, even going back to the old metric vs imperial debate, there were very good benefits to the imperial system back when calculators were rare as multiples of 12s were more convenient to divide in the most common fractions (2, 3, 4, 6). Even now our clocks are based on those multiples due to their convenience for general use.
Saying 1.09e-10 meters is fine, I guess, but it's a lot easier and more intuitive to think in terms of units of CH (plus 10%), especially when you're talking about more than one.
Remembering that CH is about 1Å and CC is about 1.5Å is such a basic approximation that it's become universal.
1ft per nanosecond. (Okay, 11.8 inches.)
There’s also reasons that the speed of light is the “natural” speed to discuss large distances in — particularly astronomical ones.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28speed+of+light%29*%2...
eg Bohr radius is roughly half an angstrom and width of H2 gas is just under 3A
By expressing them in pm they actually lose some context as then they're all just numbers.
Daltons is a similar concept that springs to mind
You’re being pedantic, and incorrectly so at that.
I agree pm is a better choice than mÅ, but I’m not positive mÅ wouldn’t pass NIST internal review, especially if it’s in common use in the field.