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Human scale
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== Common sense and human scale == "[[Common sense]]" ideas tend to relate to events within human experience, and thus commensurate with these scales. There is thus no commonsense intuition of, for example, interstellar distances or speeds approaching the speed of light. [[Weights and measures]] tend to reflect human scale, and many older systems of measurement featured units based directly on the dimensions of the body, such as the [[foot (unit)|foot]] and the [[cubit]]. The [[metric system]], which is based on precisely reproducible and measurable physical quantities such as the speed of light, still attempts to keep its base units within the range of human experience. Systems of natural units (such as [[Planck units]]) are useful in theoretical physics, but are not suitable for everyday purposes; because the [[SI]] units are defined in terms of constants of nature they can be thought of as natural units rescaled to human proportions.
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