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How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by janus2@lemmy.sdf.org to c/askscience@lemmy.world

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Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit's dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That's as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

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[–] burgersc12@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really like that one! Guess there's really no easy way around leap day, but i was thinking you could add an extra ~60.684 seconds to each day and pretend its the same thing? Even increasing the second to be slightly longer could make it possible i think, since we are restarting from scratch it would be easier to adjust it slightly

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Assuming you can measure that precisely. We had to wait centuries to figure out the differebce between a solar and a sideral day.