• Tar_Alcaran
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    fedilink
    535 hours ago

    Gold makes for an awful standard due to thermal expansion, but I feel this is more a historical artefact than an actual standard.

    • @NegativeInf
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      4 hours ago

      Right? Didn’t they define the kilogram, make identical copies of the standard, sent them to different countries, then after years, reunited them and found they all diverged in mass?

      And now they have made a perfect silicon sphere with the same mass as the standard kilogram, then counted all the atoms. So now we know the exact mass in silicon atoms of a kilo.

      Let’s just define tagliatelle in light nanoseconds and be done with it.

      • @subtext
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        333 minutes ago

        Since 2019, the kg is just defined in terms of the Plank constant and some math with the resonant frequency of cesium as well as the speed of light. There was too much variability in anything physical so they decided to just fix some constants at whatever value they were close to.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_revision_of_the_SI

      • @[email protected]
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        232 minutes ago

        They counted the atoms?
        Didn’t they just took the mol mass and calculated it? (Not sure if mol mass is the right term… School chemistry is a long time ago…)
        And I don’t see how we even should be able to count them.
        Would be really interested, if it happened that way, how they did it.

    • @Buffalox
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      54 hours ago

      This is Italy, it’s got have style.