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In Science News: The Kilogram defined


rpgamer

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From what I've read, it sounds like they've had to round off or fudge a couple other numbers to do so. (the Planck constant, elementary charge, Boltzmann constant, and the Avogadro constant). Which, while those were all known to a pretty high decimal count, hadn't previously been strictly defined as constant. And, it hurts my soul a little that they've had to settle on redefining them for the sake of nailing down the kilogram. Seems kinda like scientists just got fed up with the whole problem and said fuck it, we'll settle.

Not that I could really blame them, I suppose.

I'm sure there aren't many here that will find this very fascinating. The only real reason it piqued my interest was that I had peeked in on the kilogram conundrum once or twice in the past.

Congrats, Science, for finally figuring out how much a kilogram is.

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Lol, nah. Those can all be vaguely related, to some approximate degree. But for the level of precision some of the latest science expects, you need some proper constants.

Used to be a collection of objects, all kept in France, that defined various units, with some sister prototypes scattered around the world, which would all have to be checked and rechecked periodically to see if they're changing at all (they did), and recalibrate things based on that. It was a simpler time.

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