FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL CONSTANTS IN INTERNET

Gleb Belov

Chemistry department, Moscow State University,

119992 Moscow, Russian Federation, gbelov@yandex.ru

Nowadays for many people the internet is a main source of the reference data. Information on fundamental physical constants is sought for by many students, scientists and engineers. The practice shows that one of the most popular search systems Google place in the first place in such cases another very popular resource Wikipedia as the source of information. Wikipedia has many variants for various languages and one can easily find that the values of many physical constants in it depend on the language. So in a small investigation dated by March, 20 this year if was found that molar gas constant can have the following values: 8.314, 8.3145, 8.31441, 8.314472 J/(mol·K), Avogadro constant: 6.02×1023, 6.022136736×1023 , 6.02214179×1023 1/mol, Planck constant: 6.626×10−34, 6.62607×10−34, 6.62606896×10−34 J·s, Newtonian constant of gravitation: 6.67×10−11, 6.6742×10−11, 6.67259×10−11, 6.67428×10−11, m3/(kg·s2), etc. In our opinion there are too few reliable sources of the information on fundamental sources of the information in the internet (or they are thoroughly hidden) and most of them have only English version (e.g. physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/). So many people who do not know English are obliged to read Wikipedia. We propose to create a multilingual site on fundamental physical constants. It is not neither difficult nor expensive but will be helpful for many interested people all around the world.

The study was supported by RFBR grants ¹ 08-03-00506-a and 08-03-00221-a.