"What is The SI?” A Proposal for an Educational Adjunct to the Redefinition of the International System of Units-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

"What is The SI?” A Proposal for an Educational Adjunct to the Redefinition of the International System of Units

Published:2018-12-14 Issue: Volume:123 Page:
ISSN:2165-7254
Container-title:Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
language:en
Short-container-title:J. RES. NATL. INST. STAN.

Author:

Zimmerman Neil M.¹^ORCID,Newell David B.¹

Affiliation:

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Physical Measurement Laboratory, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA

Abstract

We discuss how the impending redefinition of the SI system of units might affect the ability of students to understand the link between the units and the new system. The redefinition will no longer define a set of base units, but rather a set of constants of nature, such as the elementary charge, e. We point out that this list of constants need not be the only way to introduce students to the subject, either in class or in textbooks. We suggest an alternative way to introduce high school and undergraduate students to the redefined SI, by suggesting a list of experiments for some units; this list would be completely compatible with the redefined SI, and would have all of the same scientific and technological advantages. We demonstrate by questionnaire results that this alternative is more appealing to students. We hope to spur a discussion amongst teachers regarding this important topic for high school and undergraduate physics courses.

Funder

Physical Measurement Laboratory

Publisher

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Subject

General Engineering

Reference10 articles.

1. The December 2013 draft of the 9th SI Brochure is no longer available on the WWW; the 5 February 2018 version is available at https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/si-revised-brochure/Draft-SI-Brochure-2018.pdf. Proposal A is almost identical with the 5 February 2018 version. Proposal B is quite similar to Section 2.3.1 of the 5 February 2018 version. The newer version now has some references to other units; for example, the defnition of the meter now has a reference to the second as being defned by ΔνCs. Also, it is likely that, soon after publication of this paper, the redefnition of the SI will be formally adopted on 20 May 2019.

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