Centimetre gram second system of units - Electromagnetic units

The centimetre-gram-second system (CGS) is a system of physical units. It is always the same for mechanical units, but there are several variants of electric additions. The system goes back to a proposal made in 1832 by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and was in 1874 extended by the British physicists James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson with a set of electromagnetic units. The sizes (order of magnitude) of many CGS units turned out to be inconvenient for practical purposes, therefore the CGS system neve ...

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• Centimetre gram second system of units - Electromagnetic units

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While for most units the difference between cgs and SI is a mere power of 10, the differences in electromagnetic units are considerable; so much so that formulas for physical laws need to be changed depending on what system of units one uses. In SI, electric current is defined via the magnetic force it exerts and charge is then defined as current multiplied with time. In one variant of the cgs system, electrostatic units (esu), charge is defined via the force it exerts on other charges, and current is then defined as charge per time. One consequence of this ...

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Centimetre gram second system of units, Centimetre gram second system of units - Electromagnetic units

Read more here: » Centimetre gram second system of units: Encyclopedia II - Centimetre gram second system of units - Electromagnetic units