IMS_Blog

The Farn is a measure of length I made up in my head whilst lying half asleep this morning. I document it here because I’m in that sort of mood. In my (probably warped) imagination the Farn was decreed to be the unit of length by a medieval lord in the eleventh century. This probably happened in an alternate universe. It just so happens to be three metres long.

The Farn came about because I was thinking about the convergence of length scales and I wondered if a physical length scale automatically has convergence at zero. The zero of temperature scales don’t match because where the zero should be isn’t immediately obvious. For length though there’s an obvious physical zero which leads naturally to all length scales converging to have the same zero. The thing about the Farn is it doesn’t. To measure length in Farns you must ask what is the difference in length to The Farn (the wooden rod original produced by my medieval lord). In this way the natural zero shared by other length scales is -1 Farn and a distance of 6 metres would be 1 Farn. Anyway, there’s absolutely no point to this, or any pretence at deep thoughts. I just felt like writing it down.