I’ve been trying to read and comprehend the reasons why, but I still don’t get it.
In: Chemistry
Well, it had to be something. And the unit ‘[yocto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yocto-)gram’ hadn’t been invented. The choice of C-12 was a compromise between competing standards.
> The existence of two distinct units with the same name was confusing, and the difference (about 1.000282 in relative terms) was large enough to affect high-precision measurements. … For these and other reasons, in 1961 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which had absorbed the ICAW, adopted a new definition of the atomic mass unit for use in both physics and chemistry; namely, 1/12 of the mass of a carbon-12 atom. This new value was intermediate between the two earlier definitions, but closer to the one used by chemists (who would be affected the most by the change).[11][12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_(unit)
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