The idea that one should give up on having a purely ‘absolute’ system (i.e. one where only length, mass, and time are the base dimensions) was a departure from a viewpoint that seemed to underlie the early breakthroughs by Gauss and Weber (especially their famous ‘absolute measurements' of Earth's magnetic field), and it took some time for the scientific community to accept it—not least because many scientists clung to the notion that the dimensions of a quantity in terms of length, mass, and time somehow specify its ‘fundamental physical nature’.:24, 26