PHYS114 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Christiaan Huygens, Farad, Ampere

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Physics
• Course: PHYS114
• Professor: Meldrum

Document Summary

The smallness of things on the atomic level and the largeness of things on the universal level poses a problem of measurement. Things behave strangely on these levels, so it"s important that we have an effective system of units for accurate measurement in these planes. The french si system of units is a system that can be divided into two different sub categories. Base units - these are units that cannot be derived from other units. Seconds, meters, kg, ampere, kelvins, mole, candela. Derived units - these are units that can be derived from the base units. Joules, watts, coulombs, ohms, newtons, pascals, bolts, teslas, sieverts, farads, etc. Often we look for repeating phenomenons to help us define time. Early attempts at this looked like sundials that relied on the movement of the sun across the sky, chinese water clocks that used the flow of water, or hourglasses that relied on the speed of shifting sand.