All corrections
Wikipedia July 8, 2026 at 05:59 PM

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

2 corrections found

1
Claim
Germany, France and Japan will jointly develop a railgun weapon.
Correction

Japan’s May 30, 2024 defense agreement with France and Germany was a railgun-technology cooperation framework, not a commitment to jointly develop a railgun weapon.

Full reasoning

The official Japanese Ministry of Defense announcement says the parties signed "Implementation Guidelines for Cooperation on Railgun Technologies". It explains that the purpose is to facilitate exchange of information and opinions and examine the possibility of collaboration in railgun-technology research, development, testing, and evaluation. That is materially narrower than saying the three countries "will jointly develop a railgun weapon".

In other words, the official record describes a technology-cooperation and feasibility framework, not a definitive trilateral weapon-development program.

2 sources
2
Claim
By definition, if a current of one ampere flows in a pair of ideal infinitely long parallel conductors that are separated by a distance of one meter, then the magnitude of the force on each meter of those conductors will be exactly 0.2 micro-newtons.
Correction

That was the old SI definition of the ampere. Since the 2019 SI redefinition, the ampere is defined via the elementary charge, not by the force between parallel conductors.

Full reasoning

This sentence reflects the pre-2019 SI definition of the ampere. Under the current SI, the ampere is defined by fixing the numerical value of the elementary charge (e), not by the force between two infinitely long parallel wires.

NIST explicitly says that until 2019 the ampere’s official definition was the hypothetical parallel-conductor force experiment. The BIPM’s current SI definition page defines the ampere by fixing the value of the elementary charge. So the article’s wording is outdated and incorrect as a statement of what is true "by definition" today.

2 sources
  • Ampere: Introduction | NIST

    Until 2019, its official definition ... specified a completely hypothetical situation: The ampere is that constant current which ... would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10^-7 newton per meter of length.

  • ampere - BIPM

    The ampere, symbol A, is the SI unit of electric current. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the elementary charge e to be 1.602 176 634 x 10^−19 when expressed in the unit C, which is equal to A s.

Model: OPENAI_GPT_5 Prompt: v1.16.0