Bryan units which are a human-scale version of the Planck natural units.

In bryan terms G, c, h-bar, e, k take on values millionth, billion, 10**-33, 10**-18, 10**-21.
The system has a 48-pound mass unit called dog and
a 5/8" fingerwidth-sized linear unit called bone. The length unit turns out to be one hundredthousandth of a mile, to within half a percent.
Time is told in ordinary hours minutes seconds and there is a smaller time unit *snicker* (roughly a twentieth of a second) for technical uses. k here stands for the Boltzmann k. Angular format is used for frequencies.

Exact definitions of the units are as follows

time unit (snicker) 1/18.55 second
length unit (bone) 10**-9 c snicker
mass unit (dog) 10**33 h-bar snicker per square bone.
force unit (kibble) dogbone per square snicker
energy unit ---(no special name)--- kibblebone
power unit (chi) kibblebone per snicker
pressure unit (bigshot) kibble per square bone
momentum unit ------kibblesnicker
angular momentum unit -----kibblebonesnicker
temperature unit (grade) 10**-21 kibblebone/k
charge unit (quint) 10**18 e.

By coincidence the system has the mile (100 thousand bone), the pound (1/48 dog), the gallon (1000 cubic bone) as auxilliary multiples of the base units just defined. The kibble force unit is a 27 pound force and therefore roughly equals a weight of two stone, a weight sometimes called a *quarter*.

Ten bone is roughly the width of a palm with extended thumb, or a fist with thumb extended. There were greek and tradtional British units of this size (see OED on shaftment). We've acquired the habit of calling this approximately 6 3/8" length a *bryan*. Two hands palms up can form a roughly 100 square bone (square bryan) area. The pressure of one kibble over this larger 100 square bone area is ONE HUNDREDTH of the bigshot base unit and has been called in some of our discussions a shot of pressure. Normal atmospheric is about 20 shots and bike tyres are commonly pumped up to about 100 shots, or one bigshot.

The grade temperature scale defined here is absolute and has very large steps. Paul Birch has proposed a relative-to-freezing scale with milligrade steps--a thousandth of a grade in size. For practical purposes one can get "degree Birch" temperatures from Celsius just by multiplying by 7--(or 7.06 if more accuracy is needed). A recognizable shirtsleeve comfort range is 100-200 degree birch corresponding to 14-28 Celsius or 57-83 Fahrenheit. The scale is relative to freezing placed at 1928 milligrade or 1.928 grade.

The coefficient in the fourth power radiation law works out to be
pi**2/60 millichi per bone**2 per grade**4.

The coefficient in Coulomb's law works out to be
alpha x 10**12 kibble bone**2 per quint**2.

[Compare metric pi**2/60 k**4 h-bar**-3 c**-2 = 5.6704 x 10**-8 watts per meter**2 per kelvin**4, and metric
alpha h-bar c/e**2 = whatever Coulomb's constant is in metric: 1/(4pi x 8.854187817 x 10**-12) newton meter**2 per coulomb**2.]

Avogadro's number is 10**23, in the bryan context.
Compare metric 6.022142 x 10**23.

The mass of 10**23 carbon-12 atoms is approximately 12/131 millidog. Paul has suggested that the millidog be name "nonce" because it is nearly an ounce, being some 21.766 grams. The mass of 10**23 ordinary atomic mass units, for practical purposes, is thus 1/131 nonce. This has been determined to greater precision but for convenience is stated here only to three-place accuracy.

Boltzmann's k is 10**21 kibblebone per grade and therefore the constant R in the gas law (which characterizes ideal gas behavior) is 100 kibblebone per grade-mole.

With normal conditions described as any for which
the temperature in grade is ten times the bigshot pressure, the molar volume is one gallon. That is
10**23 molecules occupy 1000 cubic bone. Body temperature in grade (2.19) is ten times the sealevel pressure norm in bigshot (0.219), so at those conditions a gallon lungful of air contains 10**23 air molecules.

Bryan mile is 1616.13..meters, within half a percent of ordinary British mile.
Dog is 21.766 kilograms, very close to 48 pounds.
Closest classical or traditional unit to dog I could find is talent---the basis of Attic greek weight scale, often listed as 26 kg or 57 pounds.

In the greek system the talent was 60 mina. The mina was somewhat smaller than a pound. If talent were revised to 48 pounds and integrated with bryan units, it would be both 60 mina and 48 pounds, making a mina 4/5 of a pound. The drachma, which was 1/100 of mina, would therefore be 1/125 of a pound. The conventional pennyweight would turn out to be 3/7 drachma. Instead of "dog" one would say "talent". I have thought about this and decided that dog sounds better and is more descriptive. I know dogs who weigh 48 pounds. So although one COULD revive the talent and merge this Greco-Roman weight into bryan units (along with mile, gallon, pound) at present there seems no compelling reason to do so.

In previous post I see I made a small typo about 15 lines from end where I omitted a minus sign. It should say:

Boltzmann's k is 10**-21 kibblebone per grade

the units have a lot of nice coincidences that make frequently used constants and some data easy to remember and work with.

One nice coincidence is that temp at core of sun,
according to Allen's astrophysical data book, is
100 thousand grade.

this is where the energy in our food comes from. Sometimes when I'm having lunch I try to imagine the conditions in the central 10 percent of the sun where the fusion happens because the good feeling of a restored bloodsugar level comes from the fusion down in the core. and most all the other energy in the environment too.

Using the simple bryan constants, the characteristic kT energy in core is 10**-16 kibblebone.
(easy to convert to analog of "electronvolt" unit
but wont at this point)
the frequency of a kT photon is 10**17 per snicker.
the corresponding wavelength is 10**-8 bone.
these are x-ray photons typical of suncore.

for comparison with visible light, the wavelengths of red green blue are
7, 5, and 4 millionths of a bone. much longer than
suncore x-ray of 1/100 millionth, or 10**-8 bone.

the energy in the curry I just ate appeared as photons of that kind of light and gradually percolated out to surface.
Where it was just as much energy but a whole bunch cooler.
And from there it radiated off into space. and got
into some farmer's rice field. and became curry.

>the energy in the curry I just ate appeared as
>photons of that kind of light and gradually
>percolated out to surface.

Lighting your own fart is quite dangerous, you know.

Ralf

May I assume that, because you believe that "lighting one's own is quite dangerous" you always ask other people to light yours?

failed to see relevance

was thinking about angular momentum as a quantity
and the intuitive idea of an amount of "spin"
(not the physicists more general idea of spin
but the amount of spin you put in a wheel of
your bike as a kid, very basic picture)

I wanted to put it in traditional units
pound-force, inches of crank-handle radius,
so poundxinch torque
applied for a second or some number of seconds.

(did not want to use pound-inch-trice here but
only completely familiar things)

I calculated the quantum of angular momentum
with what I hope is a fair amount of precision in "pound inch seconds"
and it came to

0.93339 x 10**-33 pound inch second.

Can you confirm this (I've never seen the natural unit of spin expressed in those exact units)? What evidence suggests that
macroscopic angular momenta are integer multiples of this very small amount?

the unit may have graphic immediacy to a user of traditional units who wants to understance spin:

imagine a 4 inch crank-handle and applying 1/4 pound force at the end of the arm for one second in order to give a wheel a 1/4 x 4 x 1 = 1 pound inch second spin.

The dimension of angular momentum is MLL/T, so the units are lb in**2 s**-1. This is the same as action (energy x time). So the Planck angular momentum is simply Planck's Constant (or h/2pi if you prefer). Or have I misunderstood what you were trying to do?

Oh, bother, you're using pound-force again. I wish you wouldn't. In that case, lbf.in.s is dimensionally correct.

I hold no brief for lbf. But lots of people say
psi for pressure and footpounds of torque. So
they are thinking of force in pounds.
I have been worrying about a communication problem.

Say you have someone whose only familiarity with
physics is through the vernacular everyday engineering of automechanics and such---fixing the car, maintenance etc. Lets say he is immediately turned off if you say a metric unit to him. The only way you can talk is if you use inches, poundsforce etc. that he knows.

he says: I hear you talking about units built into nature, show me examples.

[his model of what units is is a length, a mass, a volume, a time---it governs what he expects. My idea of units includes units of speed, power, frequency, spin, energy--you can GET all the rest from a trio
like speed, force, spin but he doesnt realize that, say]

I say: well for example speed. You know mph is a unit.
Maybe not what you expected (length, volume, mass) but there is a clear speed unit in nature and you can use it to GET other units.

Like if you had a clock and a speedgauge so that you could measure miles and mph then you could measure miles.

He says: yes I can see that. there is a built in natural unit of speed but where is the clock?

I say: cant show you clock yet, but there is a natural unit of spin. when a kid you would turn the bike upside down and crank the pedals and make the rear wheel spin. One unit of torque you know is poundinch.
(a pound of push at end of inch-long lever or handle,
or half a pound at end of 2-inch handle, or third of pound at end of 3-inch handle, all the same)
A unit of spin you know is poundinch second--the spin you put on by giving poundinch twist for one second,
or half a poundinch torque for 2 seconds, all the same.
OK the natural unit of spin is there in nature (ask Paul your physicist friend) in fact amazingly enough
spin is quantized, all spins are multiples of the natural unit. It is also in light, governing the ratio of energy to frequency. It is an amazing natural unit
called h-bar and it is right about 10**-33 poundinchsecond.

Now the question is, how does he take this. There is a natural unit of spin. It is all around you in every bit of light (relating energy and frequency) and in all the angular momentum in the world even that of spinning planets. This spin unit is really really built in to things. And it just happens that we know
how much the natural unit is. And it happens that HIS UNIT poundinchsecond that he knows how to measure spin of bike wheels with IS roughly 10**33 times the natural unit.

This is a big stretch and requires a trusted authority to assure him that there is this microscopic amount of spin in nature, even out in empty space where there is nothing but light traveling in paths curved by gravity, and that HIS UNIT really is roughly 10**33 times the natural one.

Here at least in charicature I am the unpredictable wild man and you are the trusted authority. I'm asking that you confirm that
h-bar is 0.93339 x 10**-33 lbf in sec.

Because lbf is the force which man-in-street uses
to define torque when it is time to use a torque-wrench on the bolts on the cylinder-head of the car
engine or to judge the torque he is putting on the
bike pedals.

I get h-cross = 3.6037E-31 lb.in**2/s = 0.93342E-33 lbf.in.s

And please stop writing pound or lb when you mean pound-force or lbf. In contexts like this it is highly confusing.

I shall do as you suggest and write lbf for poundforce.

We agree out to four places that

h-cross = 0.9334 x 10**-33 lbf in sec

This means that the poundforce-inch-second unit of spin that might communicate to a mechanic
or at least to an automotive engineer is

1.071 x 10**33 times the natural unit of spin.

It is that natural unit (multiplied by 2 pi) that
Mohr and Taylor propose to base the kilogram on. It
is there and as solid logically as a block of metal.
It's everywhere. But I feel my man-in-the-street is still dubious.

What he would like is if he could look into the universal vacuum with a magnifying glass and see a little ruler with inchmarks hanging suspended in space.
or bonemarks and penny-rulings.

But we can show him that the speed of light is there and that h-bar is there (also intrinsic to the light).

To make a complete set we need one more thing (three units will generate the rest).

What would you say to making the third a force?

The 10**40 ton force that figures centrally in the
equation of General Relativity---relating curvature to density.

The curvature multiplied by this force is the energy density that causes (by its gravity) the curvature.

Then I say to him: look, most of nature is this apparently empty space with light passing through it in curved lines

1) the lines are curved by a 10**40 ton force F

2) the quanta all exhibit h-cross

3) they are all going speed c.

These are the three units, all the others arise from them.

h-cross x c divided by F is an AREA

it is the natural unit area and its square root is the natural length

but because it is a vacuum you shouldn't expect to see little areas and lengths in it. be satisfied that
there is a speed c, a spin h-cross, and a force F.
these are the units that light and gravity CAN show
you anywhere they are and everywhere that is.

Maybe this will work.

Thanks Paul,

L

Going by the article in the may 2002 Sci Am,
the average separation of Pluto and Charon
is 12,100 miles and the orbital radian time
(period/2pi) is 1.02 days.

The two seem to be a "double planet" because comparatively close to being the same size--charon has half the diameter of pluto--closer in size than moon is to earth.

Very quick to calculate the combined mass of
this system if one calculates in dogs.

12.1 million**3/1630**2 x 10**6 dogs

6.67 x 10**20 dogs.


footnote---if you work it in metric you need to know the number of seconds in a day is 86,400 and if you work in bryan you need to know the analogous thing for snickers. 1,602,720 snickers in a day.
I think in thousands of snickers and remember there are 1603 in a day---a thousand snickers is minute-sized, ten percent less but still has a minute feel.
Sometimes call it a Planck minute. Anyway 1603 such minutes in a day. That is where the 1630 in the preceeding calculation comes from---1630 minute arctime of Pluto-Charon orbit.
Semimajor axis is 12.1 million paces and arctime is 1630 minutes--cube one and square the other---
12.1 million**3 divided by 1630**2 is 6.67x10**14 cubicbone/squaresnicker and G says each of those units is worth a million dogs.

G = one millionth cubicbone/squaresnicker per dog

1/G = one million dogs per cubicbone/squaresnicker.

It relates inertia to gravitational attractiveness
(of which distance cubed over time squared is a measure). Trying to go light on symbols and asterisks here so it might look a bit odd though right enough.

btw looks like people might switch from the microwave Cesium clock to a new optical-wavelength clock. An institute in Harsching. Indium possibly. Calcium also discussed. Anybody heard of this?

The latest issue of Scientific American is solely about time and also covers new approaches to measure time more accurately.

Ralf

yes, indeed the sci am mentioned the
work at Harsching which appear to make
possible an optical frequency clock
(indium, mercury, calcium are possibilities)
as compared with what we have which is
a microwave frequency clock (cesium spin
resonance)
I would like to find out more.
if you see any other articles please
tell this thread
thanks,
L

Actually, that's probably a good idea ! Sciam always (at least for me) leaves that aftertaste that a little (or quite) a bit more information wouldn't have hurt.
Ever checked on that faculty's website ?

Have you read the article about the clock that's supposed to last millenia ? At first I was intrigued, but when I realized that you have to rewind it once a year I thought it's kinda pointless...

Ralf
P.S.: Probably quite off-topic, but at least not chewed on 50 times

Which faculty's website? SciAm or Garching MPI?
Earlier I dyslexified the word Garching.
I think these guys at the MPI for Quantum Optics
(Thomas Udem and Theo Haensch) may be candidates
for the short list of metrology greats.

(Brian Josephson, von Klitzing, Brian Kibble,...)

SciAm, p93 of 9/02 issue: "In 1999 {they et al]
figured out a way to measure optical frequencies
directly, using a reference laser that pulses at a rate
of one gigahertz. Each pulse of light is just a couple
dozen femtoseconds long...
The spectrum of a femtosecond pulse is a bizarre thing
to see: millions of sharp lines spanning the rainbow, each line spaced the same distance from its neighbors, like marks on a ruler..."

In the "matched and metered" box on page 91 you can see the application. The pulsing laser is put through a prism and the GHz pulsing freq is adjusted to make
one line match a color from some atom (THz).

The point is to count the THz optical freq. Ordinarily one cannot count optical THz, only microwave GHz.
What they have done is arrange to count the optical
freq (from an atom, mercury, indium, calcium are possible choices) by locking the GHz pulsing frequency
to it and counting the GHz.

People have locked laser freq together over a frequency range of
some powers of two, by a series of things that
divide freq in half. this is several decades old

the new thing these people appear to have done is
go by a step which is several orders of magnitude
bigger.

however caveat their device is not yet stable and
not ready for timekeeping. it only shows how
clocks could be made using high-freq colored light
instead of the microwave signal from cesium.
the metrologists suggested time measurement might
go to accuracy of 10**-18

the Sciam article gives two URL on time measurement,
one is the UK NPL site and one is a boulder colorado
NIST site.

www.npl.co.uk/npl/ctm/time_measure.html

boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/

did you try either of these? i didn't yet.

Actually, I must say I didn't spend too much time thinking about the spectrum the pulse produces when I read the article.
Interesting though that they get a discrete distribution of frequencies with a time-constrained signal (pulse), after all only periodic signals have a discrete distribution, time-constrained ones have a continual distribution. It can't be the periodicity of the pulse itself they see because that would make the whole thing pointless...

On the other hand, it could be because they use a monochromatic laser to produce the pulse which might only have integer harmonies then...

Interesting, interesting...

Ralf