10 Facts About CGS

CGS system has been largely supplanted by the MKS system based on the metre, kilogram, and second, which was in turn extended and replaced by the International System of Units.

CGS system goes back to a proposal in 1832 by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to base a system of absolute units on the three fundamental units of length, mass and time.

Sizes of many CGS units turned out to be inconvenient for practical purposes.

SI units are predominantly used in engineering applications and physics education, while Gaussian CGS units are commonly used in theoretical physics, describing microscopic systems, relativistic electrodynamics, and astrophysics.

CGS units are today no longer accepted by the house styles of most scientific journals, textbook publishers, or standards bodies, although they are commonly used in astronomical journals such as The Astrophysical Journal.

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The continued usage of CGS units is prevalent in magnetism and related fields because the B and H fields have the same units in free space and there is a lot of potential for confusion when converting published measurements from CGS to MKS.

Indeed, both of these mutually exclusive approaches have been practiced by the users of CGS system, leading to the two independent and mutually exclusive branches of CGS, described in the subsections below.

ESU and EMU subsystems of CGS are connected by the fundamental relationship, where c = 29 ˜ 310 is the speed of light in vacuum in centimetres per second.

Practical CGS system is a hybrid system that uses the volt and the ampere as the unit of voltage and current respectively.

An advantage of the Gaussian CGS system is that electric and magnetic fields have the same units, 4pe0 is replaced by 1, and the only dimensional constant appearing in the Maxwell equations is c, the speed of light.