International System of Units

Hands up who's with me.

Matthew says, I see the Tangerine Terror has renamed AI, no doubt due to his determination to introduce European surrender measurements to the United States with the International System of Units.

Or was it Skynet Intelligence he wanted it named after? It's a lot of words.

I'm not sure they actually make any sense.

Do they? The International System of Units.

Not AI, IS.

Anyway...

Astronomers needed terms for billions of stars, and engineers needed to describe megabytes in the 1980s.

When the International System of Units introduced prefixes like giga and mega, they sidestepped the whole naming chaos by tying numbers directly to powers of ten.

So today when we say a billion dollars, we're using a term that's been contested for centuries, but has finally settled into a global standard.

But the story doesn't end there.

He has also been named the person of the century for the seventeenth century.

The unit of force in the International System of Units is named after him.

Most of his scientific papers are kept at the University of Cambridge.

Other collections are held in Israel, London, and the United States.

Yeah.

The System International, the, the SI units like meters and newtons, is universally preferred in science, but the reality of the American construction industry means you're often dealing with pounds, feet, and gallons on a daily basis.

It's like the ultimate translation issue.

If I'm following a baking recipe and I, you know, confuse a teaspoon with a tablespoon, I just ruin a batch of cookies.

Initially accurate to about one second in 300 years, Essen's breakthrough sparked a worldwide frenzy in metrology, as various nations set out to build their own state-of-the-art atomic clocks based on his design.

And just over a decade later, in 1967, the body overseeing the International System of Units convened for their semi-regular General Conference on Weights and Measures, where they redefined the length of a second according to Essen's definition.

This enabled the establishment of extremely precise International Atomic Time, and eventually Coordinated Universal Time, which combines the reference point of Greenwich Mean Time with atomic levels of accuracy.

By then, the most precise atomic clocks were not gaining or losing a second in over 30,000 years.