this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Mildly Interesting
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Whatever kind of energy was kept in mind as a unit was developed, all units of energy "are a measure" of the same thing: energy. And also work because that's actually just energy. They're just different sized units like cm vs inches or °F vs °C.
A fathom was designed to measure how deep water is, but nothing is stopping me from saying that a football field is 50 fathoms long. A calorie was designed to measure heat, but nothing stops me from saying it takes about 5 calories of work to compress a bike spring.
The reason we have the SI is that once you understand how all the different units for one quantity interact, and how they're related to the units for another quantity, we may as well just make them interact simply and stick to one unit for each quantity to reduce confusion.