History
The CGS system goes back to a proposal in 1832 by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. In 1874, it was extended by the British physicists James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson with a set of electromagnetic units.
The sizes of many CGS units turned out to be inconvenient for practical purposes. For example, many everyday objects are hundreds or thousands of centimetres long, such as humans, rooms and buildings. Thus the CGS system never gained wide general use outside the field of science. Starting in the 1880s, and more significantly by the mid-20th century, CGS was gradually superseded internationally for scientific purposes by the MKS (metre–kilogram–second) system, which in turn developed into the modern SI standard.
Since the international adoption of the MKS standard in the 1940s and the SI standard in the 1960s, the technical use of CGS units has gradually declined worldwide, in the United States more slowly than elsewhere. CGS units are today no longer accepted by the house styles of most scientific journals, textbook publishers, or standards bodies, although they are commonly used in astronomical journals such as the Astrophysical Journal. CGS units are still occasionally encountered in technical literature, especially in the United States in the fields of material science, electrodynamics and astronomy. The continued usage of CGS units is most prevalent in magnetism and related fields, as the primary MKS unit, the tesla, is inconvenienently large, leading to the continued common use of the gauss, the CGS equivalent.
The units gram and centimetre remain useful as prefixed units within the SI system, especially for instructional physics and chemistry experiments, where they match the small scale of table-top setups. However, where derived units are needed, the SI ones are generally used and taught instead of the CGS ones today. For example, a physics lab course might ask students to record lengths in centimetres, and masses in grams, but force (a derived unit) in newtons, a usage consistent with the SI system.
Read more about this topic: Centimetre–gram–second System Of Units
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)