Boffins Cook Raw Numbers, Hope to Bake Perfect Kilogram
23rd December 2012
A “recipe” to deliver the perfect kilogram as a mass standard that the world can trust is coming closer to completion as the physicists behind the project bake their raw numbers.
International scientists met in late November and pushed forward a 21-page document that’ll eventually instruct boffins responsible for managing weights and measures how to adopt a planned quantum kilogram as an SI standard. This comes after decades of work attempting to redefine the kilo in terms of a fundamental constant of nature. It is the only SI unit still directly defined by an artefact.
I’m sure you were as worried about this as I was.