Unity

When in labs we where constructing a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of the LMC(large magellanic cloud) from images, we where also given isochrones which where theoretical values that should relate to the stars in the LMC. It came to a point where we had to shift said isochrones by a value to make them roughly correspond to data points collected.

Most people around me got 23 or 24, so we asked the helper what the value should be? He replied about 23.5, to which one of my friends sounding quite annoyed with him self I didn't think of using a fractional number, to be far to him we where all thinking it.

It seems silly thinking about it now there where no reason not to use them but for some reason we all unconsciously enforced unity on our values. Yo might just think it's use but the quark model was held back for some time because people believed that charges only came in unit values(1,2 or 3) - or so Murray Gell-Mann says so.

It seems strange to me that we force ourselves to think that unity so some how more beautiful than fractions when they are completely arbitrary the fractional charges on quark is only because it was long ago that the charge on an electron and proton was declared as the elementary charge - and therefore 1.

Just thought it was interesting to think about...