Stoney units
In physics the Stoney units form a system of units named after the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney, who first proposed them in 1881. They are the first historical example of natural units, i.e. units of measurement designed so that certain fundamental physical constants serve as base units. The set of constants that Stoney used as base units is the following:
This means that, in terms of Stoney units, the numerical values of all these constants equal one:
Stoney's set of base units is similar to the one used in Planck units, proposed independently by Planck thirty years later, but Planck normalized the reduced Planck constant in place of the elementary charge. In Stoney units, the numerical value of the reduced Planck constant is not 1, but is
where α is the fine-structure constant. Planck units are more commonly used than Stoney units in modern physics, especially quantum gravity (including string theory). Rarely, Planck units are referred to as Planck–Stoney units.
George Stoney was one of the first scientists to understand that electric charge was quantized; from this quantization he deduced the units that are now named after him. James G. O’Hara pointed out in 1974 that Stoney’s derived estimate of the unit of charge, 10−20 ampere-second, was 1⁄16 of the modern value of the charge of the electron. The reason is that Stoney used the approximated value of 1018 for the number of molecules presented in one cubic millimetre of gas at standard temperature and pressure. Using the modern values for Avogadro’s number 6.0238×1023 and for the volume of a gram-molecule (at s.t.p.) of 22.4146×106 mm3, the modern value is 2.687×1016, instead of Stoney's 1018.
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