Measurements

Ok, good day, I am so glad that you are visiting my blog, thanks. Well the first topic that we will see in this physics course is about measurement. I would like you to think about the next two questions: What does measurement mean in your own words? and Why do you think the measurement has been important to human beings?. Well maybe it would not be easy to answer this kind of questions, but the answer could be found if you check humanity’s history. As you remember in humanity’s history, there were many cultures in the past, and each one of them tried to understand how they could explain things like how long, how big, how heavy, how deep and how cold or warm something was. The best way to define measurement is the following: “Measurement is a comparison between two things, one of them is called measurement patron and the other one is what must be measured.” If you remember the ancient man started to measure the things using the comparison and a measurement patron and each culture has its own measurement patrons. You can see this in the next links: • • • •

http://centros4.pntic.mec.es/ies.zurbaran/REPERCUTEC/Actividades /Medidas/Historia_de_la_medida.htm http://www.elagrimensor.net/elearning/lecturas/ANTIGUAS%20UNI DADES%20DE%20LONGITUD.pdf http://www.arrakis.es/~lavelane/ www.culturaclasica.com/cultura/pesos_medidas.htm

At the beginning, the measurements came up for covering the necessity to establish an agreement within commercial business. Because of this,there were many units systems that continue existing nowadays. Due to the scientific and technological development in many areas like mathematics, physics and other exact sciences in the world, among researchers arose the necessity to interchange information in order to understand and share the discovers and the knowledge that they had developed. As a result of this, the units of conversion have been an important tool that permits us to communicate in the scientific and technological field. In order to understand the measurement, I propose the next activity: In pairs •

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Try to measure the same thing using another different thing as measurement patron (each person). Obtain all the measures necessaries to define the thing. After that, share your information with your co-worker In pairs, design a unit of conversion between measurement patrons Give a summary about the activity.

In order to explain how to do a unit of conversion, you can check these links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzK7Dujki00 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xb8hsw7IY&NR=1 Ok, I hope that all this information has served you in order to understand our first topic of our physics course. See you in the next topic blog