#fundamental quantities

These are from “The Troublesome Dimensions” from Astounding Science Fiction, November 1956. (see caption for the second picture)

The interesting insight (which is a little brain-bending, actually) is that physical quantities we regard as “fundamental” aren’t actually so, in a sense: mass, length and time can actually be restated in terms of other quantities which themselves can be regarded as fundamental, and how we came to choose mass, length and time as fundamental is in some part an accident of the fact that we live on a spherical planet with a relatively constant gravitational field at its surface.