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 3/10 Fair --- www.radioactivecommunistzombies.com http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioactiveCommunistZombies
| The musings of a conservatarian frustrated writer. ... |
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 --- 74 days ago http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RadioactiveCommunistZombies/~3/273272981/weighty-
| Here's a quandary: how much does a kilogram weigh?
That's easy, you think. A kilogram weighs 2.20462262 pounds.
Actually, no, a pound weighs 0.45359237 kilograms.
But nobody knows what a kilogram weighs. Seriously.
How's that possible? Well, according to a Los Angeles Times story by Jia-Rui Chong: In the more than a century since [U.S. kilogram standard] and dozens of other exact copies were crafted in France to serve as the world's standards of the kilogram, their masses have been mysteriously drifting apart . . . In essence, no one really knows today what a kilogram is. The problem is, the one master standard, called "Le Grand K," made in 1878 and kept in France, and the exact copies made of it in 1888, now don't weight the same. No one knows if the copies are changing, Le Grand K is changing, or both. And the drift is not constant. Some replicas weigh more, some weight less than Le Grand K. France's copy weighs 2 micrograms less. The United States' copy is 18 micrograms more.
You might think a change of less than 0.000002% is nothing to worry about but in the ultra-precise world of physics, it can throw off your results: The difference is on average about 50 micrograms -- about the weight of a grain of fine salt. But the ramifications have rippled through the world of precision physics, which uses the kilogram as the basis for a host of standard measures, including force of gravity, the ... |
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