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The kilogram doesn't weigh a kilogram any more. This sad news was announced during a seminar at CERN on Thursday, 26 October by Professor Klaus von Klitzing, who was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the quantised Hall effect. "We are about to witness a revolutionary change in the way the kilogram is defined," he declared.
Together with six other units – metre, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela – the kilogram, a unit of mass, is part of the International System of Units (SI) that is used as a basis to express every measurable object or phenomenon in nature in numbers. This unit's current definition is based on a small platinum and iridium cylinder, known as "le grand K", whose mass is exactly one kilogram. The cylinder was crafted in 1889 and, since then, has been kept safe under three glass bell jars in a high-security vault on the outskirts of Paris. There is one problem: the current standard kilogram is losing weight. About 50 micrograms, at the latest check. Enough to be different from its once-identical copies stored in laboratories around the world.
To solve this weight(y) problem, scientists have been looking for a new definition of the kilogram.
Dang. That throws the easily memorable conversion of 1kg=2.2lbs right out the window.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @10:12PM (1 child)
Nothing brings out the pedantic assholes like the metric system.
Enjoy, my lonely friends, today victory is yours!
And I should point out that "metric" is the name for an obsolete, inconsistent system of units.
The correct name for the modernized system you casually mis-refer to as metric is "Système International", abbreviated as "SI" in English communication.
Please do not refer to it as metric, or no one will understand you, much like "weight" and "mass"!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:12PM
My (parent) post was modded FLAMEBAIT.
That proves my point better than the post itself.
Some people have skin an Angstrom thick.
Oops, that's a deprecated pre-SI metric unit, you might not (or you could pretend to not) know what that means.