Gene Nygaard wrote in message . ..
On 12 Dec 2003 09:05:15 -0800, (Fred the Red
Shirt) wrote:

[I probably snipped a bit too much. If the proper attribution is
unclear, just go back to the earlier articles.]


What you address here is an vagueness in human language, not an
ambiguity in natural law.

Good grief. What in the world do you think we've been talking about.
Of course, it is linguistics.

Evidently that is what you have been talking about, not I.

I thought this was clear, but let me carify it now. When I refer
to weight, without modifier, I refer to weight as defined by
Newton's Law of Gravitation and that definition can be written
thus:

W = Gp * (m) / (r^2) Where Gp = G * mp.

G is the gravitational constant
mp is the mass of the planet to which the weight is referred
m is the mass of the body whose weight is in question
r is the distance from that body to the center of mass of
the planet in question (assume a spherical cow, er planet)
* is multiplication
/ is division
^ is exponentiation
2 is an integer greater than one but less than 3
W is then the weight of that body.

One could define weight using different symbols and explain those
symbols in a different language and that would be the SAME definition
of weight, not a different one because scientific definitions are
conceptual, not linguistic.



What's really strange is that there are always some fools who will
insist that when we buy and sell goods by weight, we'd want to measure
some quantity that varies with location. How stupid can some people
be?

I never found any who wanted to do that, nor anyone who does
because on a practical level wherever the measurement is made,
even if it is made by actually measuring force, the variance
is so small that most normal folks consider in negligible, or
rather it IS so negligible that no one has any reason to consider
it at all. I'll be damned if I can understand why you find that
miniscule variance to be so disconcerting.

It is a whopping 0.53%, even if you limit yourself to SEA LEVEL.

Throw in Mt. Chimborazo, the highest mountain on Earth, and it gets
close to 3/4 of a percent; more than 1 part in 140.

Now, if you have a standard 400 oz t bar of platinum, do you suppose
it would make a difference if they were units of force rather than
units of mass? Would three ounces at $600/oz matter?

I sincerely doubt that I shall ever be trading in precious metals
let alone doing so at the summit of Mt Chimborazo. I repeat that
for most folks any difference that results from neglecting the
issue is insignificant.



Get it through your thick skull that "weight" is an ambiguous word,

I understood that already and am quite prepared to explain it.

In Newtonian Physics, 'weight' is a force. Mass OTOH is the factor of
proportionality between force and acceleration.

In General Relativity, 'weight' is a geometrial distortion of
space-time due to the presence of mass.

So weight is either a force or a geometrical effect, depending on
which model you happen to be using at the time.

Those models only explain weight AFTER you have chosen to define it as
the effect of gravity.

They do not 'explain' weight. They define weight.

If it [the pound] was
defined as a unit of weight then it was simultaneously defined as
a unit of force without regard to whether or not the person(s)
defining it UNDERSTOOD that they were doing so.

Bull****.

The meaning of "weight" which is a synonym for "mass" in physics
jargon

Can you state the formal name any internally consistant physical
theory in which weight and mass are synonyms? As illustrated above,
that is true of neither Newtonian Physics, nor General Relativity.

There are different quantities involved here. But there is no
"natural law" which tells you what word you should be using for any of
them.

Agreed.


You can choose to call a certain quantity "weight." Your doing so,
however, does not magically erase other meanings which the word
already had.

Nor do those other meaning prevent you from using that same word
to represent a different concept. It is those concepts I discuss
using (or at any rate attempting to use) language to discuss
those, rather than simply dicussing the language with no regard
for concept.


I know of no physical theory, nor any physicist that uses the words
weight and mass interchangeably within the discipline of physics
itself.

In the first place, what in the world gave you the idea that what
physicists do has anything whatsoever to do with "baggage weight"?

Nothing. I was refering back to your statement:

'The meaning of "weight" which is a synonym for "mass" in physics jargon'


In the second place, it isn't true. Ever heard of atomic weight?
Molecular weight?

Those are not weights. That the word weight appears in those terms
does not make them weights any more than the use of the word force
in the term 'corriolis force' makes it a force.


Do you remember the days when atomic weight in physics was different
from atomic weight in chemistry? When one of them defined it based on
oxygen-16 being 16.0000, and the other defined it based on the natural
mix of oxygen isotopes being 16.00000?

No, I learned the formal defintion of the mole after it had been
restated based on C-12.


is quite proper and legitimate, well justified in history and
in linguistics and in the law.

Have you never heard the adhomition, 'The law cannot change a fact'?
Surely the same is true of language, see below.

No "facts" are being changed.

My point exactly.

Back to your boheaded pedantistic statement that so many authors
have 'got it wrong' (my paraphrase) when they define the pound
mass to be the mass of an object that weighs one pound. Surley
a liguist such as yourself has sufficient cunning to understand
that authors of textbooks often nay, typically employ esotheric
defintions of terms in common usage for the the purposes of the
curriculum. Thus if within that curriculum the pound force is
defined first then the pound mass may be defined as the mass
of an object which weighs one pound.

Now mind you, I never had a course nor saw a text that actually
bothered to formally define either the pound mass or the pound
force. My physics texts only dealt with formal defintions of
SI units and my engineering texts generally assumed a practical
understanding of units of measure.

But in what order an author chooses to introduce units and
therfore which are derivative of the others may be based,
or dare I say SHOULD be based on the approach the author wishes
to take in teaching the material in question. An engineering
text or physics text is not a text in the history of commerce,
in the history of the standardization of units of measure by
government burocracies, nor of lingusitics and the author need
not slavishly adhere to such histories or histrionics so long
as the bridges designed by his students do not collapse.

These texts are not 'wrong'. Your arguemtn would only show
show them to be wrong if they attributed the author's defintion's
to a standards organisation.


Here's a FAQ by the NPL, the national standards laboratory of the
U.K.:
http://www.npl.co.uk/force/faqs/forcemassdiffs.html

Weight
In the trading of goods, weight is taken to mean the
same as mass, and is measured in kilograms. Scientifically
however, it is normal to state that the weight of a
body is the gravitational force acting on it and hence
it should be measured in newtons, and this force
depends on the local acceleration due to gravity.

See? I'm right.

About which of those two definitions?

About the ambguity. There are TWO defintions.



That IS just what I wrote befor, pounds are ambiguous, slugs
are not. Can you get that through YOUR thick skull?

No, you went beyond that, and claimed that pounds force came first.

No I claimed that the pound mass could be losely defined based on
the pound force. That is true. I can define pound force first and
pound mass second, as perhaps is done is some texts or more importantly,
I can assume that the reader is famliar with the pound force and not
the pound mass and thus inform the reader that the pund mass may be
define loosely, as the mass of an object that weighs one pound.



What they measured and what they wanted to measure are in total
agreement. So there is no room for you to claim this ambiguity in
ancient times--that only shows up after we start getting engineers in
the modern sense.

I agree that in ancient times the issue was one of vagueness, not
ambiguity.


I will add, at the risk of causing you a stroke, that the distinction
between mass and weight exists regardless of the language being used
or even if language exists at all. Should we all be struck dumb,
we would not simultaneously become weightless.

Quite the contrary, this problem is very much a language specific
problem, one that English shares with some other languages such as
French. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I'll stick to my statement that depriving us of language will not
render us weightless.


For example, when physicists using the Norwegian language were
shopping for a word to use in their jargon for the same things for
which those using English use "weight," they did not choose "vekt"
(various spellings such as vikt, wægt, etc. over time), which is the
cognate of "weight" in English. Instead, they choose an entirely
different word, "tyngde." So Norwegian doesn't have the same
ambiguities that English has.

You can't get a much better indication that the only science involved
here is linguistics, can you?

I suppose linguistics is a 'science' in the same sense as library
science, political science or (shudder) computer science. And,
yes, I agree that your arguments are entirely linguistic.

--

FF