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How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by janus2@lemmy.sdf.org to c/askscience@lemmy.world

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit's dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That's as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

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[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Start with your finger, 4 fingers to a palm, 4 palm to a bar. So 16 fingers. Give each finger a unique name and symbol.

Then make a perfect cube of that size, fill with alcohol and that weights 256 bwu, base weight unit.

1024 bars, or 2048 if you're one of those crazzy bastards from up north, is a mile now.

Skip a head a few century and niw wr entet the computer age with a hexdecimal counting system.

[–] bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Skip a head a few century and niw wr entet the computer age with a hexdecimal counting system.

And a new language too!

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I hate my phone keyboard