You got pascal, bar, psi, atm, torr, and all kinds of column heights of mercury, water and whatnot.
Why do we need all these different units to express pressure?
In: Physics
Imagine you have a bunch of balloons, and you want to measure how much air is inside them. Different people in different places came up with their own ways to measure it, just like we have different languages to say the same thing.
1. **PSI (Pounds per Square Inch):** This is like saying, “How many pounds of air are pushing on every little square inch of the balloon?” People in the United States often use this.
2. **Bar:** This is another way to measure pressure, used in many places around the world. It’s like using meters instead of feet to measure height.
3. **Atmosphere (atm):** This measures pressure based on the air pressure at sea level on Earth. It’s like saying, “How much air is in the balloon compared to the air around us?”
4. **Torr:** Named after a scientist named Torricelli, this measures pressure in a way that’s useful for scientific experiments, like how tall a column of mercury would be pushed up by the air pressure.
Each of these units measures the same thing—how much air is pushing on something—but they just use different systems or ways to describe it. It’s like how you can count fingers in English, Spanish, or French; the number of fingers is the same, but the words are different.
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