One of my professors told his students that, if someone read all the scientific journals in only one field of science twenty-four hours a day, they could not keep up with all of the changes and discoveries in that single field. My Chemistry Project activity book tries to stick to science basics and ignore these rapid changes.
A reminder of this professor was in “Science News” this week. It seems the 27th Annual Conference on Weights and Measures have added four new metric measures: the ronna, quetta, ronno and quetto. These extend the prefixes for both larger and smaller measures needed for some of today’s discoveries.
Why does a change in metrics matter to my Chemistry Project? Although these units won’t, science, including chemistry, uses the metric system.
Why Have a Metric System?
There was a time a few hundred years ago when every town and village had their own system of measurement. When these became part of countries, a countrywide system was used.
Science is international. Scientists in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa need to use the same system to make exchanging ideas easier. That system is the metric system.
Every major country in the world except the U.S. uses the metric system. Unknown to most U.S. citizens, we do use it every day as our money is a metric system. Any business doing business overseas uses the it.
Metric Is Part of Science Basics
The first part of my Chemistry Project is on the metric system. The only requirements for using the metric system are knowing the prefixes and being able to count to ten.
One of the puzzles in this part is a word skeleton for the various metric prefixes. Perhaps I should add the new ones.
However, I won’t. Devising a new puzzle takes time. And very few of these prefixes will be used in the Chemistry Project. I will stick to the science basics and leave those students interested to look up these new ones on their own.
