No other base units have a prefix, so why does mass?
In: 188
To the OP: A very good and interesting question!
The answer to the OP question is: Because the “kilogram” is the base unit of mass in the coherent SI Metric System. You can’t change the base unit to the “gram” without changing all the other SI Metric units or it would then be non-coherent.
The reason is that the French waffled (see what I did there?) on their definitions of the base units and finally ended up with a thousand of the original units as their base unit.
As you can see from all the posts, this creates quite the confusion and the “kilogram” is incorrectly named and causes people to think that the “gram” is the base unit when it is not. Since it is incorrectly named, it is also incorrectly taught and people don’t learn that the kilogram is the base unit until later after they’ve already learned “gram” (because of the name).
It is incorrectly named because the SI Metric system is a very simple system with simple rules and uses a “<Number> <Prefix> <Unit>” naming scheme.
The “kilogram” is the only unit that breaks this naming scheme.
According to the SI Metric rules, you can’t say something is “500 kilokilograms”.
Therefore it ought to be renamed to something else to allow the normal usage of the mass unit with prefixes.
I propose using “klug” as new renaming for the current name “kilogram” so we can then use prefixes with the base unit of mass properly. I chose “klug” because it would have the same symbol “kg”.
I really don’t care what the name is, as long as it doesn’t have a prefix (“kilo”) in the name.
If we could rename (name change only, not redefinition) then we could deprecate the names “ton” and “gram” and only use the new name (“klug”, “grave”, something else?) as the name of the SI Metric mass base unit.
The SI Metric system is a brilliant simplification compared to all other measurement systems. The current incorrect name for the mass base unit complicates that simplicity, causes confusion and errors and creates a special case rule that has to be taken into account.
To properly use the SI Metric system, all other names for mass units should be deprecated or gotten rid of, there is no need for any other name than the base unit name when it is properly named.
1000 milliklugs (grams) = 1000 mkg = 1 klug (1 kg) = base unit of mass
1000 klugs = 1 kiloklug (same as current “metric ton”)
Yes, as is normal, it would take a long time before this new name would be used a lot but other renamings have occurred in the past. Centigrade -> Celsius, Cycles per Second -> Hertz.
I’m constantly finding web sites (even educational web sites) that claim the “gram” is the base unit of mass because of this issue. I try to contact the web administrator and get them to fix this and most sites quickly fix the issue but it is wide spread.
The SI Metric system is very good but there are several issues that I think need to be fixed with the current SI Metric System, which I’ve detailed here at the [https://github.com/metricationmatters/research](https://github.com/metricationmatters/research) URL.
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