Click here to purchase the entire book in PDF format. cgs In older books, you may come across the ``cgs'' system. This is similar to the SI, however, instead of metres, kilograms and seconds, the standard units are centimetres, grams and seconds. Most of the conversions from SI to cgs are pretty simple. There's one unit however, that we should mention here, and that's the dyne (abbreviated dyn) which is the cgs unit for force. 1 dyne of force will accelerate 1 gram at 1 centimetre per second squared. If you need to convert to newtons, use the following conversion formula: 1 N = $10^{5}$ dynes