Thoughts
5
This
part may be a little tedious, but please read it through because
where I am going later will probably depend on what follows.
On
October 25, 1791, Washington appealed a third time to Congress, "A
uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the
important objects submitted to you by the Constitution and
if it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and
universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than
conducive to the public convenience", but it was not until 1838
that a uniform set of standards was worked out.*
A
standard either has a starting and stopping place like time, or
compares one thing with another.
The
standards are kept at NIST ( National Institute of Standards and
Technology ) for the USA. Some of these standards are:
Time
base: Second; the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation
associated with a specific transition the cesium 133 atom.**
Length
base: Meter; the length of the path traveled b light in a vacuum
during a time interval of 1/299,792,4589 of a second**
Electric
current base: ampere**
Temperature
base: Kelvin**
Luminous
intensity: candela**
Mass:
kilogram; a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy kept by the
International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris, France.**
Amount
of substance: mole**
There
are standards that we set up that are not so well defined. Some of
these are fat/thin, near/far, big/small, many/few, tall/short, etc.
We need all standards to communicate. An alphabet is standards for
sounds of a language. A combination of sounds of an alphabet sets up
another standard; a word. In English when someone says the sound for
tree, all that speak English have an idea of what that person saying
tree is talking about. We can use other sounds (adjectives for
example) to further communicate what kind of tree we are talking
about. Other languages may have more or possibly less words to
describe a tree. Using one of the other languages allows us to better
convey or less likely to convey an understanding of that tree. So the
language we use can limit our understanding or help us more fully
understand individual items.
As
I said in the introduction, I am an expert at nothing, but it seems
to me we have to have dualities for our intellect to try to
comprehend anything; a start/stop, a small/large, etc. Of course
there maybe others ways of learning than with our intellect. We may
have propensities to act in certain ways in particular situations
passed to us through our genes. Also, there maybe some intuitive way
of learning. The only one that I am reasonably sure of is with our
intellect. Intellect is what I will be referring to hereafter in this
piece.
** “A Brief
History of Measurement Systems” from NIST, U.S. Department of
Commerce
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