General Conference on Weights and Measures

Dear Readers, As your friendly neighborhood Percival, I’m here once again to share with you another amusing story that hides in the folds of our everyday life. This time, I’ll take you on a journey into the world of scientific measurement, specifically, the quirky tale of the kilogram. Yes, you heard it right, the humble kilogram has a story of its own, filled with constant changes and a recent major shift that rewrote its very definition. The kilogram, a unit of mass universally acknowledged, used in our daily lives and science alike, has had an intriguing history. Its definition, which we might presume as steadfast, has wavered over the centuries. It was once defined as the mass of a liter of water, and then later, a specific piece of metal stored carefully in France. This piece of metal, known as the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), has been the […]