{"id":84520,"date":"2018-11-05T19:42:22","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T03:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/scientists-are-about-to-redefine-the-kilogram"},"modified":"2018-11-05T19:42:22","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T03:42:22","slug":"scientists-are-about-to-redefine-the-kilogram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/scientists-are-about-to-redefine-the-kilogram","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Are About to Redefine the Kilogram"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The kilogram is one of the most important and widely used units of measure in the world \u2014 unless you live in the US. For everyone else, having an accurate reading on what a kilogram is can be vitally important in fields like manufacturing, engineering, and transportation. Of course, a kilogram is 1,000 grams or 2.2 pounds if you want to get imperial. That doesn\u2019t help you define<\/i> a kilogram, though. The kilogram is currently controlled by a metal slug in a French vault, but its days of importance are numbered. Scientists are preparing to re define<\/i> the kilogram using science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually harder than you\u2019d expect to know when a measurement matches the intended standard, even when it\u2019s one of the well\u2013define <\/i>d Syst\u00e9me International (SI) units. For example, the meter was originally define <\/i>d in 1793 as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the north pole. That value was wrong, but the meter has since been re define <\/i>d in more exact terms like krypton-86 wavelength emissions and most recently the speed of light in a vacuum. The second was previously define <\/i>d as a tiny fraction of how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Now, it\u2019s pegged to the amount of time it takes a cesium-133 atom to oscillate 9,192,631,770 times. Again, this is immutable and extremely precise.<\/p>\n

That brings us to the kilogram, which is a measurement of mass. Weight is different and changes based on gravity, but a kilogram is always a kilogram because it comes from measurements of density and volume. The definition of the kilogram is tied to the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK, see above), a small cylinder of platinum and iridium kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France. Scientists have created dozens of copies of the IPK so individual nations can standardize their measurements, but that\u2019s a dangerous way to go about it. If anything happened to the IPK, we wouldn\u2019t have a standard kilogram anymore.<\/p>\n

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The kilogram is one of the most important and widely used units of measure in the world \u2014 unless you live in the US. For everyone else, having an accurate reading on what a kilogram is can be vitally important in fields like manufacturing, engineering, and transportation. Of course, a kilogram is 1,000 grams or [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,48,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-particle-physics","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}