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On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:04:26 GMT, Richard Clark
wrote: Dr, Wilkins saying that he hath read for him in his church) that is poor and a debauched man, that the College have hired for 20s. to have some of the blood of a Sheep let into his body Contains a Pound reference you obviously missed (from the exchange rate of 20 Shillings). Now, as every good Englishman would have understood back then, this was a conversion. If he held 20 coins they were NOT a Pound which is a single coin. There is an equivalency, but this does not constitute an equality. Pepys could have written 1£ that is shorter, but he did not as it was obviously not what was tendered to the debauched man. Hi All, The application of the monetary unit is not without is antecedents in weight. The ancients, that is the pre-Newtonians, did not comprehend the separable notion of mass from weight as they did not accept the concept of "force" which was largely rejected by scientists of Newton's day. In fact, Newton introduced the notion of forces in his treatise "Opticks." However, to return to the legacy of £. The symbol is drawn from Libra. I have already discussed the operation of the balance scale and its relationship to Libra is evident in the astrological application. Libra (as is the latinate pondo) was the unit of weight (not scientific mass, they had no such distinction) in ancient Rome. I notice that our correspondent who relies on scientific cut-and-paste retorts to dismiss scientific workers; and, as an acknowledged untutored English speaker (several classes notwithstanding) also leverages dictionaries to the same poor quality of transliteration. The OED (which I am sure to get copious and unreliable rebuttal to) offers of "mass" a physics application buried quite deeply within the usage of this word across time (the OED is a dictionary of enumerated usage by time, not by current application). For many hundreds of years, mass merely meant the agglomeration of stuff (it didn't matter what or why). Through the work of Newton's introduction of the concept of force, the term, by OED account, then gained a distinction such that they offer the definition: "6.b. Physics. The quantity of matter which a body contains; in strict use distinct from weight. 1704" This is a pleasurable aside, these side bars of minutia to our usual concerns. A do enjoy the drama queens that our group attracts and the revisionist logic that attends their petty issues. Forgive me Gene, but you don't have much else to offer and you will be gone soon anyway, so go away mad (to invert an old saw). ;-) 73's Richard Clark, KB7QHC |
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