Units and Dimensions Questions Total marks: 50 (1x5=5) 1. Answer the following. (Each question carries 1 mark) 1.1.

What characteristics, other than accessibility and invariability, would you consider desirable for a physical standard? 1.2. Why was it necessary to specify the temperature at which comparisons with the standard meter bar were to be made? 1.3. Can you suggest a way to measure the radius of the earth? 1.4. Express your height in the metric system of units. 1.5. A new unit of length is chosen such that the speed of light in vacuum is unity. What is the distance between the Sun and the Earth in terms of the new unit if light takes 8 min and 20 s to cover this distance? (2x5=10) 2. Define with examples. (Each question carries 2 marks) 2.1. Fundamental Unit 2.2. Derived Unit 2.3. Systematic Errors 2.4. Absolute errors 2.5. Percentage errors (5x7=35) 3. Express the distance from earth to sun in parsecs and in light years. 4. A unit off time sometimes used in microscopic physics is the shake. One shake equals 10-8 sec. Are there more shakes in a second than there are seconds in a year? Mankind has existed for about 106 years, whereas the universe is about 1010 years old. If the age of the universe is taken to be one day, for how many seconds has mankind existed? 5. The radius of the proton is about 10-15 meter; the radius of the observable universe is about 2028cm. Identify a physically meaningful distance which is approximately halfway between these two extremes on a logarithmic scale. 6. A student measures the thickness of a human hair by looking at it through a microscope of magnification 100. He takes 20 observations and finds that the average width of the hair in the field of view of the microscope is 3.5 mm. What is the estimate on the thickness of hair? 7. A LASER is a source of very intense, monochromatic, and unidirectional beam of light. These properties of a laser light can be exploited to measure long distances. The distance of the Moon from the Earth has been already determined very precisely using a laser as a source of light. A laser light beamed at the Moon takes 2.56 s to return after reflection at the Moons surface. How much is the radius of the lunar orbit around the Earth? 8. A physical quantity P is related to four observables a, b, c and d as follows : P = a3b2/ The percentage errors of measurement in a, b, c and d are 1%, 3%, 4% and 2%, respectively. What is the percentage error in the quantity P? If the value of P calculated using the above relation turns out to be 3.763, to what value should you round off the result? 9. Let us consider an equation 1 mc2=mgh 2 Where m is the mass of the body, v its velocity, g is the acceleration due to gravity and h is the height. Check whether this equation is dimensionally correct.