All Topics  
Cycle per second

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Cycle per second
 
 
  Topics Cycle per second Topic Home

The cycle per second was a once-common unit of frequency
Frequency

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency....
.

With the organisation of the International System of Units
International System of Units

The International System of Units is the modern form of the metric system and is generally a system devised around the convenience of the number ten....
 (abbreviated SI from the French) in 1960, the cycle per second was officially replaced by the hertz
Hertz

The hertz is a measure of frequency per unit of time, or the number of list of cycles per second. It is the SI base unit of frequency in the International System of Units , and is used worldwide in both general-purpose and scientific contexts....
, or reciprocal second—i.e. the cycle in cycle per second was dropped. Perhaps because of the convenient brevity it brings to both speech and writing, this particular mandate has been so widely adopted as to render the old cycle per second all but extinct.

Nonetheless, the change is not without its critics, who argue that the hertz should be redefined as simply a renaming of the cycle per second it displaced, rather than as the reciprocal second.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Cycle per second'
Start a new discussion about 'Cycle per second'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


The cycle per second was a once-common unit of frequency
Frequency

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency....
.

With the organisation of the International System of Units
International System of Units

The International System of Units is the modern form of the metric system and is generally a system devised around the convenience of the number ten....
 (abbreviated SI from the French) in 1960, the cycle per second was officially replaced by the hertz
Hertz

The hertz is a measure of frequency per unit of time, or the number of list of cycles per second. It is the SI base unit of frequency in the International System of Units , and is used worldwide in both general-purpose and scientific contexts....
, or reciprocal second—i.e. the cycle in cycle per second was dropped. Perhaps because of the convenient brevity it brings to both speech and writing, this particular mandate has been so widely adopted as to render the old cycle per second all but extinct.

Nonetheless, the change is not without its critics, who argue that the hertz should be redefined as simply a renaming of the cycle per second it displaced, rather than as the reciprocal second. Since SI has adopted the radian
Radian

The radian is a unit of plane angle, equal to 180/pi Degree , or about 57.2958 degrees, or about 57?17'45?. It is the standard unit of angular measurement in all areas of mathematics beyond the elementary level....
 as its preferred but dimensionless unit of angle
Angle

In geometry and trigonometry, an angle is the figure formed by two Ray sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle . The magnitude of the angle is the "amount of rotation" that separates the two rays, and can be measured by considering the length of circular arc swept out when one ray is rotated about the vertex to coincide...
, but left its explicit writing discretionary in unit combinations, the radian per second has perhaps a better claim than the cycle per second to being equivalent to the reciprocal second. But the hertz is overwhelmingly (some would say exclusively) used in the sense of cycle per second, and certainly never used in the sense of radian per second.

The obsolete terms kilocycle, megacycle and kilomegacycle still occur in some older documents; the modern equivalents are kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz, respectively.