Category: Measurement

The Standard Kilogram The SI standard of mass is a platinum–iridium cylinder (Fig. 1-4) kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris and assigned, by international agreement, a mass of 1 kilogram. Accurate copies have been sent to standardizing laboratories in other countries, and the masses of other bodies can be determined…

Time has two aspects. For civil and some scientific purposes, we want to know the time of day so that we can order events in sequence. In much scientific work, we want to know how long an event lasts. Thus, any time standard must be able to answer two questions: “When did it happen?” and “What…

In 1792, the newborn Republic of France established a new system of weights and measures. Its cornerstone was the meter, defined to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator. Later, for practical reasons, this Earth standard was abandoned and the meter came to be defined as the distance between…

We often need to change the units in which a physical quantity is expressed. We do so by a method called chain-link conversion. In this method, we multiply the original measurement by a conversion factor (a ratio of units that is equal to unity). For example, because 1 min and 60 s are identical time intervals, we have…

In 1971, the 14th General Conference on Weights and Measures picked seven quantities as base quantities, thereby forming the basis of the International System of Units, abbreviated SI from its French name and popularly known as the metric system. Table 1-1 shows the units for the three base quantities—length, mass, and time—that we use in the early chapters…

We discover physics by learning how to measure the quantities involved in physics. Among these quantities are length, time, mass, temperature, pressure, and electric current. We measure each physical quantity in its own units, by comparison with a standard. The unit is a unique name we assign to measures of that quantity—for example, meter (m) for the quantity length.…

Science and engineering are based on measurements and comparisons. Thus, we need rules about how things are measured and compared, and we need experiments to establish the units for those measurements and comparisons. One purpose of physics (and engineering) is to design and conduct those experiments. For example, physicists strive to develop clocks of extreme…