Scientific units were standardized to the current Système Internationale d'unités (SI) in about 1970. For the most part conversion involves applying simple factors of 10 to convert centimeters and grams to meters and kilograms, but in magnetism conversion is more complicated and confusing because the old cgs system had, for historical reasons, two sets of units for electricity and magnetism: electrostatic and electromagnetic units. The latter, abbreviated to emu, concern us here. Understanding of emu is necessary to understand the old, and some not so old, literature. The paleomagnetic community has been particularly slow to convert to SI, and even today some papers give results in emu.
SI achieved the worthy goal of unifying the system of units for both electricity and magnetism; it also removed some factors of from the basic equations (Table U1). The critical difference between the two systems arises from the distinction between magnetic induction or flux density Band magnetic...
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Bibliography
Blakely, R.J., 1996. Potential Theory in Gravity and Magnetic Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, R.F., 1992. Paleomagnetism: Magnetic Domains to Geologic Terranes. Boston: Blackwell Scientific.
Jackson, J.D., 1999. Classical Electrodynamics, 3rd edition. New York: Wiley.
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Gubbins, D. (2007). Units. In: Gubbins, D., Herrero-Bervera, E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4423-6_310
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