questions & comments

[Rebecca and Rowland]

At 11:35 am +0200 9/7/98, Ulrik Vieth wrote:
>Rowland wrote:
>
>> It depends on what you mean by `correct'.  As far as I can tell the
>> correct way to write the SI unit `gauss' is like that.
>                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Sorry, but as a physicist I have to object here: `Gauss' (whatever you
>want to spell it) is _not_ an SI unit.  The SI unit for the magnetic
>field is acutally Tesla (T), which relates to Gauss (G) as 1 T = 1 kG.

Oh yes... (it's been a while since I've played with magnetism)  btw, as a
physicist myself (albeit not a good one), I suppose I ought to continue
with this nit-picking my pointing out that the physical unit `gauss' should
be written in English with a lower-case `g' unless starting a sentence.

>In addition, physicall units are never written out as full names in
>formulas.

But they are sometimes written out in full in the text.

[snip]
>> And you could argue that the correct way to write the name `Gauss'
>> if you're writing English is like that too, since English doesn't
>> have \ss.
>
>It is certainly the most widely used spelling in the literature.

But surely that's only because most literature mentioning Gauss is written
in English?

>P.S. in Germany we also have 1 G = 10 DM, given that Gauss's face
>appears on the 10 DM bank note, so we have 1 T = 1 kG = 10 000 DM.

:-))

Rowland.