Abstract
This article gives an overview of the new SI and a few details as to how it was set up. Those interested in the story of how the kilogram was fixed by tying it to the Planck constant can go straight to Section 5. Otherwise, apart from the introduction given as Section 1 which also presents excerpts from the relevant official documents on the key aspects of the new system, Section 2 gives a brief timeline of the history of the decimal metric system, Section 3 gives a few details of the procedural steps—from the setting up of a standard of measurement to its percolation to the public, taking the time standard as an example, and Section 4 attempts to give a flavour of the actual process of the setting up of a standard.
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https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si-brochure/SI-Brochure-9-concise-EN.pdf
The International System of Units (SI Brochure), 9th edition, 2019, https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/
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Amit Roy, Great Experiments in Physics—Tunnelling in Superconductors: The Josephson Effect, Resonance, Vol.3, No.11 p. 8, 1998.
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge material and tables from various documents put up on the internet by the BIPM that I have referenced below [1, 2, 3, 8], and Wikimedia commons, BIPM and NIST as the sources for photographs. I acknowledge the anonymous referee for important suggestions.
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K Indulekha teaches astronomy and physics at the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. Her field of research is astronomy. She has given several popular science lectures in both physics and astronomy, for school and college students as well as for the All India Radio.
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Indulekha, K. The Quantum SI. Reson 25, 691–715 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-020-0984-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-020-0984-0