[Greenbuilding] Perceptions of Nature & Reality

Steve Satow naturalbuilding at shaw.ca
Sat May 25 13:41:26 CDT 2013


On 2013-05-25, at 9:58 AM, John Straube wrote:

> BTU and kilowatts are directly connected to a physical event.  You would need to take a physics course to understand how, or do a wiki search on BTU.

Really John? Wow!!!!,  :)

However, the physical event to which you allude is not a 'natural' event because it involves arbitrary human input and/or quantification. Human's 'decided' that a Btu is the amount of energy required to heat W WEIGHT of water by X number of degrees FAHRENHEIT. Nature did not create this. We might just as arbitrarily have decided that a Btu was infact the amount of energy required to heat Y VOLUME of water by Z number of degrees CELSIUS. (don't you just LOVE wikipedia!!)

I would be interested to know which units of measurement - beyond the Sidereal - are based on the observation of 'natural' events (or phenomena)? And by natural event I mean those that have not had any form of human intervention?

Seconds or Minutes or Hours are not recorded observations of natural phenomena. They are based on devices constructed for the purpose of quantifying time. A one-meter pendulum 'ticks' once every second but it's a human construct.
The Kilo and Litre are, similarly, human concepts.
Same goes for KWs and Btus.
The list goes on…

Steve.

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