Plural of dyne; units of force equal to the amount of force needed to accelerate one gram of mass by one centimeter per second squared.
From Greek 'dynamis' meaning power or force. The dyne was named in the late 1800s as a scientific unit in the centimeter-gram-second (CGS) system of measurement.
A dyne is incredibly tiny—it takes about 980,000 dynes just to lift a single apple! Scientists mostly stopped using dynes in favor of Newtons, but the unit reminds us how much the way we measure things changes over time.
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