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jamesharttoday at 4:15 AM1 replyview on HN

When dealing with waves you often are dealing with turns - or, as they’re called in that world, cycles. A cycle is a turn is tau is 2pi.

The SI unit for frequency after all is Hertz - cycles per second - which should really be considered equal to 2pi s^-1, but for complicated reasons, often isn’t, and most formulae that involve frequency ignore the ‘cycle’ - or it’s also hiding inside the definition of something like the wavelength or the Planck constant where it cancels out.

Meanwhile the SI unit for angular velocity is radians per second which is dimensionally equivalent to s^-1.

That said a becquerel, which measures rate of discrete events, is also dimensionally s^-1. (Next time you are measuring traffic to your website consider using the appropriate SI unit for measuring requests per second: the Becquerel.) - so dimensional equivalence isn’t the same as equivalence. You wouldn’t add a rate to a frequency, same as you probably shouldn’t add a torque to an amount of energy.


Replies

thyristantoday at 6:16 AM

> Next time you are measuring traffic to your website consider using the appropriate SI unit for measuring requests per second: the Becquerel.

Great idea, I will definitely do this!