Letter: Face value
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Your support makes all the difference.Face value
Sir: The erudite response of R N Robinson (letter, 30 November), challenges me to relate the two units of beauty, the millihelen (mH), and the parthenon (P).
Presumably the millihelen has units of (ships)-1, while the parthenon is presumably dimensionless. We can assume, I think, that Athena would not have allowed her temple to be equated with the beauty of a mere mortal, and would have reduced the value of the helen by the factor pi () perhaps.
So I humbly offer the Elgin Constant, E, (or perhaps the Mercouri Constant, to please our friends in Athens) as the connecting factor.
We would then find that
E x x 103mH = P
E would have the value of 1, and units of (ships). The parthenon would then equal 3,142 millihelens. Will this suffice?
IAN C DODSWORTH
Oxford
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