OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

office-formula message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [office-formula] Straw poll - slug (and lightyear)


On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 15:33 -0600, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> "Andreas J. Guelzow":
> > We say "Light-year, the distance light travels in a year of 365.25 days"
> > which isn't exact at all (we probably mean in vacuum...).
> 
> Ah, that's an error in the spec. It should *definitely* say "distance light travels, in a vacuum,
> in a year of 365.25 days".  In general, we should be giving exact values where we can.
> 
> PATRICK: Please insert ", in a vacuum," after "light travels", at that point.
> Let me know if you want me to create a separate JIRA comment for this.
> 
> WARNING: Technical nitpick ahead:
> The distance light travels in a year, in a vacuum, *is* exact; the meter is actually defined
> in terms of speed of light in a vacuum. And while an Earth year isn't exactly 365.25 days, for purposes of a
> light-year, that's the exact value of the "year". It's not well-documented, but astronomers
> use this "standard year approximation" of 365.25 days when stating light-years.
> And since a day is exactly 24*60*60 seconds, this has an exact value.
> I actually had to track that down, and I'm pretty sure I posted my citations
> (though I can't remember where they are right now).  If anyone knows differently,
> please let us know now.

But this definition is useless for the purposes of the OpenFormula
Standard. Virtually no implementor will have the ability to really
determine the "distance light travels, in a vacuum, in a year of 365.25
days". Any implementor will really take somebodies word for it. If that
is the case then I think we should say 
9,460,730,472,580.8 km
or whatever the exact value is.

Andreas



[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]