Weighing — Regulations. Instrumentation

Metrologically assessing the quantity of matter in a body has always been a necessity of the utmost importance, both in economic exchanges and in scientific, technical and industrial activities.

A fairly easily quantifiable characteristic is the effort required to lift a material body, i.e. to measure the force of gravity to which it is subjected, its weight.

The weight of a body varies with the intensity of the gravitational field, acting in accordance with Newton's law of universal attraction, and therefore depends on where it is measured, since the Earth's surface is an ellipsoidal geoid.

The weight of a body is also directly proportional to its gravitational coefficient m, its mass.

Mass is an intrinsic quantity, representative of a body, constant in space, independent of its location and the forces to which it is subjected.

In everyday life, little attention is paid to the concepts developed above. Moreover, common language, even when codified and regulated, maintains an unfortunate confusion between the notion of weight and the notion of mass, all the more so as the word "weight" is also used to designate material objects with certain regulatory characteristics – shape, constitution, material, dimension, inscription of the mass value and legal unit – intended for weighing operations, i.e. mass measurement.