Your Weight Is About to Be Redefined
A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology once said, “If somebody sneezed on [the] kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong.”
He was referring to a cylinder, sometimes called , which is housed in a vault in Paris and handled like a priceless gem. The of anything measured in the world—you, your groceries, exoplanets, galaxies—traces to the mass of this 126-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder*, the so-called international prototype. Researchers in every field of science and engineering need to trust that they’re using the same reference point as
