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To: Alamo-Girl
I suspect that both statements are true. There has been an accurate measurement of the Planck Constant by NIST. OTOH, the Planck Constant is the constant of proportionality.

I thought you might know. Then what I read was correct. That proportionality would have to be measured in every case, for every frequency, in order to be considered entirely valid, a Herculean task. You've shed a great deal of light on something I've wondered about for years. I thank you.

(It seems like I'm forever defending the Platonist position that math and geometry pre-exist and await discovery - LOL!)

This is one of the great dilemma's, isn't it? All these go back to those unanswerable questions.

Thank you so much for the encouragement and for the great discussion!

Your welcome. You have interesting posts.

1,286 posted on 12/02/2002 2:16:45 PM PST by LogicWings
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To: LogicWings
Thank you so much for your post and encouragements!

With regard to the accuracy, the NIST scientists were reporting an uncertainty of 89 parts per billion. On the NIST website, it describes the significance as follows:

In practice, an uncertainty of one part per million (abbreviated ppm) is rather respectable. It corresponds to determining the length of a United States football field (100 yards, or about 91 meters) to within the thickness of two of these pages (one page is about 0.0022 inch or 0.056 millimeter thick).

I imagine it would require new technology or procedures to be more accurate, but they have surprised me a lot in the past (LOL!)

1,287 posted on 12/02/2002 3:00:12 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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