Re: [boost] [PQS] rank of a physical quantity?

From: Gerhard Wesp (gwesp_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-19 06:13:09

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 10:04:21AM +0200, Matthias Troyer wrote:
> As a physicist I am completely baffled and confused. What do you mean  
> by rank of a quantity? Do you mean the size of a vector/matrix? If  

I understood Olegs post about rank such that it was something that would
allow to distinguish energy from torque, e.g.  Is there such a thing?
Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a situation where you might
want to add energy to torque, even if in the SI system they have the
same dimension (Nm).

Same thing for angular velocity [rad/s] and frequency (1/s).  You
probably don't want to add both, even if in SI they're both in s^-1.  Is
this maybe a deficiency of SI?  Would it make sense to add the unit
"radians" that is used colloquially anyway, to the system?

Regards,
-Gerhard
-- 
Gerhard Wesp
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For the rest I claim that raw pointers must be abolished.