If scientists had sacred objects, this would be one of them: a single, closely guarded 137-year-old cylinder of metal, housed in a vault outside of Paris. It is a prototype that precisely defines a ...

We use different devices to measure temperature. The science behind them, and concepts such as absolute zero and cold atoms, ...

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Deluged by responses to his request for your favourite units, Robert P Crease discovers that non-SI units persist, and are sometimes even popular, among the physics community Setting the standard ...

When hundreds of physicists gathered on a Zoom call in late February to discuss their experiment’s results, none of them knew what they had found. Like doctors in a clinical trial, the researchers at ...

With a dedicated monthly column, Nature Physics draws attention to metrology. And a set of Commentaries in this issue focuses on various aspects of thermometry. Physics is all about observations, ...

Researchers at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris have made the most precise measurement of one of the fundamental constants, called the fine-structure constant, providing physicists with a vital ...