Dimensional Analysis And Its Applications

1 Dimensional Analysis (Speech to Middle High School Students) How many of you could figure out as quickly as is possible, the number of seconds which are in one day? I will give you about one minute to try to get the answer and you may use your calculators. If you tried to work out the answer, but got confused by the process, I want to show you a method which I believe will help you very well. So lets begin. Some of you might have found it confusing to do the conversion, because you have to go from day to hours, hours to minutes and minutes to seconds. To do this quickly and with little or no error, we will use a method which is simple and organized. We know that 60 seconds give us one minute, 60 minutes give one hour, and 24 hours give one day. Using our method, this is what we will have: You will notice that we cancel the same units between top and bottom and the remaining units and values give us our answer. That is, we cancel the top and bottom minute units and also the top and bottom hour units. Our