Holy units of measurement
This discussion was created from comments split from: The church is the people not the building - the role of church buildings.
[I found this languishing in the middle of a serious thread in Ecclesiantics and decided it deserved a thread of its own and proper exposure. Enjoy! - Eutychus]
[I found this languishing in the middle of a serious thread in Ecclesiantics and decided it deserved a thread of its own and proper exposure. Enjoy! - Eutychus]

Comments
I would suspect you could get a lay person and a priest to bless a known volume of water at standard temperature and pressure, immerse the theometer and use those readings as calibration points. Though you'd need to know if your instrument was likely to be linear. If not then presumably you'd need some sort of more complex experimental method to derive a calibration curve. Does divinity follow an inverse square law, for example? Could you move the theometer further and further from the water and measure the fall off in the reading?
As to units... surely such things are measured in HMs? (Hail Marys)
That should cater for most Christians, at least...
You don't have to be an imperial citizen to use the foot, surely a similar logic applies here? The alternative is to fly the theometer by drone to the patch of air formerly containing the Holy of Holies, and measure everything in fractions of that (micro HHs and the like). I suspect that such an act might be Controversial.
I was wondering that - do they end up like the Farad (too big for normal use) or the Pa (much too small, in structural stress calcs). And will the HM be a stand alone unit, or for instance, do we need to consider HMm^-3s^-1? Though there we run into problems with omnipresence and timelessness.
Power-spectral-holiness, anybody?
Not sure exactly how big an HM would be, but I suspect that to be of widespread use, it has to be logarithmic.
That's what powers of 10 and prefixes are for. I'm assuming a full HH is somewhere in the same order compared with an HM as the metre is to the Planck length (~10^35 times). And yes, I did have the Farad in mind, along with the Tesla.
As for the derived units, presumably rates of change are possible (we talk about a place being made holy by prayer over time, and also of desecration). Could it be that the per-unit-volume measurement is holiness, while the base unit measures divinity? This raises in interesting question: does a blessing of water (giving holy water) convey a specific quantity of divinity or a specific level of holiness? Put another way, if you get a priest to bless a thimble of water and add it to a bucket of unblessed water, is that water the same or less holy than if the priest blessed the whole bucket? I also have to wonder what the mediating particle of divinity is. The Hermes, perhaps.
It's a measure of how sad, or how bored, I am that I'm really enjoying this.
The ancient Israelites seemed to have some kind of inverse square thing in mind as they approached the holy of holies - though dH/dx is not made explicit. Although it's not in the bible, I'm told the priest had a rope round his ankle in case he was overcome by D (or rather, H); it's not clear if a brief exposure to a fatal dose, or cumulative exposure due to a failure to consider the duration of the work event, was the risk they intended to mitigate.
What's an Ephod? I really want it be some kind of bronze-age breathing apparatus; although it's always better to control the risk at source, in this case it appears that might not be possible.
What about an impedance analogy? D(ivinity) could be expressed as Theomotive Force - or better, Scalar Theistic Potential. Then works of obedience come out as Pietistic Flux and the ratio {Potential / Flux} as (our).... Reluctance
Having, in the dim distant past, studied some electrical engineering theory, I like the idea of Pietistic Flux and Reluctance. However you probably need to also include the "Back Diabolomotive Force" of Temptation.
It's all witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy anyway...
I'll get me wand, and me grimoire.
Physics, maths, alchemy, magic, heterodox theology... all the same to Newton.
Ah, so it's a matter of dissolving then? Even so, that still leaves the question of whether each water molecule is in a binary state of holy or not holy, or if they possess holiness as some sort of continuous measurement, or indeed whether holiness can only exist in a handful of specific quantum states. Further, what quantity of divinity is required to raise the holiness of a water molecule by a given amount? Surely the Specific Holiness Capacity could vary between materials? Sacred stones seem very common, does stone perhaps have a fairly low SHC, in comparison with metals? We seems to have very few holy metal objects other than those specifically consecrated. The quantum state concept of holiness is surely supported by the existence of different classes of relic - what else could be being described here other than discrete quantum levels of holiness?
The time angle is definitely something we need to work in, since sooner or later someone charismatic is going to start going on about works of Power.
(My impedance analogy (accidentally) looks sensible here, as Power will be the product of the in-phase components of Scalar Theistic Potential (God's will) and Pietistic Flux (what we do). That sounds about right
Now I'm wondering how you build a resonant system...
So...if we can assemble a congregation where those who get ahead of themselves cancel out those who want to do what should have been done a while back, so long as the simple Resisters (note spelling!) tend to zero, the Pietistic Flux can tend to infinity!
Might it be different if it were shaken a lot, I wonder, as in homeopathy?
It is not holy until it is blessed. Thereafter however the water is enduringly holy, so like all such objects must be disposed of reverently.
As I understand it divinity cannot readily abide electricity, so on contact with the device the divinity in the Holy Water is driven out, in the usual form associated with divine wrath.
Not to be confused with cucurbits, which just pop up (briefly) in Jonah.
Aka the Charlie ... [I can't imagine anyone who looked less like one tbh]
Another very important question is whether HMs have different half lives in different liquids, water, oil etc. or whether the effect wears off at the same speed?
Perhaps, in a bow to ecumenism, the units could be oms.
In C of S the Knox?
Does the Calvin measure the level of divinity relative to absolute depravity?
Only in Geneva. For Scotland, please refer to the Knox, above.
The Calvin measures the level of free will relative to divine sovereignty.
Regarding metric and imperial systems - it seems clear that the Orthodox would be Imperial; care would be needed with a range of hard-to-remember fiddle factors when making calculations based on a mix of units, whose omission could lead to projected levels of holiness differing from empirically-derived measures by orders of magnitude. I think my own Methodism and possibly the C.of.E. would regard themselves as metric - but not entirely metric, more 'metric as was first attempted in the 1960s, not adopted widely, and largely superseded in contemporary practice'.
That leaves us stuck in CGS units, and generally lacking in Ergs.