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I hope this isn't borderline philosophy. It is really difficult for me to articulate the question and so Google was of no use to me. The question spawned when I was learning laws of conservation of energy, because although I can calculate the answers I don't understand why things like mgh (mass times gravity times height) are able to give us numbers that we can use to plug into other formulas for combining energies into totals.

Let's say we have 2 components, A and B.

A/B is the number of A per B, such as m/s.

Therefore if he have A= 10m and B = 5 seconds, we can determine that A/B is 2 meters per second.

I used this try and understand what products yield.

A times B is A of B's or B of A's.

Such as A=5, B=6, A times B is 30, or five sixes or six fives.

Now if we go back and multiply 10m by 5s, we get 50 ms.

How do you interpret 50 meter seconds or 50 second meters. What is that?

Any references for me to read would be cool too.

Thanks.

LearnIT
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1 Answers1

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The units of a (physical) quantity does not has one explicit physical meaning. For example a quantity with the units $Nm$ (Newton times meters) can mean torque, but can also mean work. So a quantity with the units $ms$ (meters times seconds) can have lots of different physical meanings, such as a coefficient found by fitting experimental data onto a model, which has to have these units to match the units of a measured quantity.

fibonatic
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