A Brief History of Time Nobel Prizewinner Bill Phillips (#265)
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
00:00
The Beautiful Definition of the Kilogram
No unit of mass is equal to the mass of a cube of water that is a 10th of meter on the side. The kilogram was chosen because it's the densest, or one of the densest of all the materials we have. It became the standard of mass for France in 1799 and then decades later when countries got together in 1875, they decided to make another kilogram made as closely as possible. If someone leaves a fingerprint on the international prototype of the kilogram, all of us will lose weight. This is scandalous right in the 21st century, we are using 18th century technology to measure mass.
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