alt Hacker NewsI basically agree, at least for standard functions like sin, cos, tan, exp etc. It is even possible to see mistakes in equations just by checking that all the units to standard functions cancel out making the arguments dimensionless.
On the other hand I am still unhappy with calling the ratio of two quantities, that happen to have the same units, "dimensionless". This way, you could create any two "dimensionless" quantities and try to compare them or use one in place of the other which might be meaningless.
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> This way, you could create any two "dimensionless" quantities and try to compare them or use one in place of the other which might be meaningless.
Case in point:
Yeah, "dimensionless" would mean they have equal dimension, which would mean they are comparable, which isn't necessarily the case. E.g. both radians and degrees are called "dimensionless".
Edit: Apparently "same dimension" doesn't imply "same unit".
You can also create meaningless dimensionless quantities by blindly mashing the number keys on your keyboard. Should we stop using keyboards?