Article: Systems of units III: electrical and magnetic units.

Certain necessary inventions of humankind seem almost to have been devised to add confusion to our lives. Two that come to mind are the international dateline and the systems of units used for electrical and magnetic quantities.

In the first two articles in this series, we showed how the units for all nonelectrical/magnetic quantities can be derived from the units of three fundamental quantities: length, mass and time. When describing electrical and magnetic quantities, a fourth fundamental unit must be added to the "big three." The choice of this fundamental unit and its assigned magnitude is the underlying cause of all the confusion.

Since these ...

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