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Being essentially unburdened by real history, but recalling that in my
youth I had to work with TWO metric systems: cgs and MKS (where the case
was very important), I just presumed that when the SI was established, the
centimeter - gram - second system lost the toss and took dynes and ergs out
of the picture too.
Tom Ford
At 02:53 PM 11/30/01 -0600, you wrote:
A student just asked me a question I couldn't answer. (usually I can make up
something convincing). Why is the fundamental unit of mass the kilogram
rather than the gram? In other words, why the prefix on the fundamental
unit. I know it was originally defined as the mass of a liter (or (0.1 m)^3)
of water. Why didn't the French call that a gram. Am I making sense?
skip