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### Will the volt, ampere, ohm or other electrical units change on May 20th, 2019? [duplicate]

When watching a video by Veritasium about the SI units redefinition (5:29), a claim that the volt and unit of resistance (presumably the ohm) will change by about 1 part in 10 million caught my ...
186 views

### How can I explain what a kilogram is using Planck's constant? [duplicate]

I want to understand what 1 kg represents. For example: I know that 1 second is equal to $9\ 192\ 631\ 770$ transitions from the microwave radiation that a cesium-133 atom (at $0$K) emits, if it's ...
132 views

### How is a Kibble balance used in the new definition of the kilogram, and what's the connection between the balance and Planck's constant? [duplicate]

The BBC News article Kilogram gets a new definition says: How does the new system work? Electromagnets generate a force. Scrap-yards use them on cranes to lift and move large metal objects, ...
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### SI redefinition of the kilogram - what is one measuring? [duplicate]

I have been reading about the new SI units and specifically, want to get a better understanding of the definition of a kilogram. It was written that the kilogram will be defined in terms of Planck's ...
137k views

### What is the difference between “kinematics” and “dynamics”?

I have noticed that authors in the literature sometimes divide characteristics of some phenomenon into "kinematics" and "dynamics". I first encountered this in Jackson's E&M book, where, in ...
18k views

### Why do atomic clocks only use caesium?

Modern atomic clocks only use caesium atoms as oscillators. Why don't we use other atoms for this role?
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### Why are scientists involved in the Avogadro Project using silicon-28 atoms instead of carbon-12?

My question is, why use silicon-28 atoms to calculate the kilogram when you already have carbon-12 atoms defining the constant? Does the Avogadro Project intend to define the constant by replacing ...
10k views

### Why is the mole/“amount of substance” a dimensional quantity?

According to the BIPM and Wikipedia, "amount of substance" (as measured in moles) is one of the base quantities in our system of weights and measures. Why? I get why the mole is useful as a unit. In ...
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### Why is the candela a base unit of the SI?

The candela is defined as The candela is the luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency $540\cdot10^{12}$ hertz and that has a radiant ...
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### Why do we still not have an exact (constants-based) definition for a kilogram?

I read that there is an effort to define a kilogram in terms that can exactly be reproduced in a lab. Why has it taken so long to get this done? It would seem this should be fairly important. Edit: ...
1k views

### Uncertainty of permittivity of vacuum

Question: The value of permittivity of vacuum, $\epsilon_0$, is given with absolutely no uncertainty in NIST Why is this the case? More details: The permeability of vacuum can be given by \mu_0=...
874 views

### Why are electrical units (specifically, electrical current) considered a base unit?

Note: this is NOT a question why current is the base unit as opposed to charge—that’s because measuring $1 \ \mathrm{ A }$ through a wire is easier to measure in a lab than is $1 \ \mathrm{ C }$ in ...
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### Magnetic effect on AC circuits?

We know that when currents in two wires move parallel to each other, they attract each other and if they are moving anti-parallel to each other, they repel each other but we cannot observe this in ...
In my A-level textbook there is no explanation regarding how the constant in the Biot-Savart law is derived! So how is the constant, $k =\frac {\mu_0}{4\pi}$ derived, and what's the intuition behind ...