Fairly often, I see people measuring time in light years. They generally mean a pretty long stretch of time, too. Like an aeon.
This is not what a light year is. Instead, it is the distance that light travels in a year. Which is a pretty arbitrary, silly, and non-decimal way to do things, but I guess it helps with spectrometry and stuff. (Also, is this a year with February 29th, or not? (Please don't answer that; it was rhetorical.))
Despite having the word "year" in it, therefore, it is not a measurement of time.
The same thing applies to parsec, which, despite being an abbreviation of "parallax second," is not a measurement of time either, Han Solo.
Just...could people not use words they don't know in a failed attempt to sound educated and science-savvy? Then I wouldn't have to judge them.
6 comments:
Hey, get off Han's case. That was a long time ago...
That small paragraph was the most wonderfully dorky thing I've seen in this blog in a long time. Kudos.
Someone, probably George Lucas, but I can't remember said, that when Han was bragging about his parsec thing with the Falcon, he was talking about the awesomeness with which he calculated his hyperspace jumps and how he covered it over a shorter distance than anyone ever had.
Wow, I'm a dork.
Well, given that superluminal travel isn't possible anyway, I'm inclined to give George Lucas some leeway there. Not a lot, but a little. Perhaps their hyperspace drives are really like warp engines, and so Han was talking about how much he managed to warp spacetime.
Then again, I'm doing a particle physics thesis where we set c=1, measure mass and momentum in units of energy, and (*gasp*) time in units of length.
Wow, I'm an even bigger dork.
Who the hell are you to be judging people anyway
Perhaps people get it confused with dog years, which do measure time, sort of.
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