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For decades, metrologists have strived to retire ‘Le Grand K’ — the platinum and iridium cylinder that for 126 years has defined the kilogram from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the cylinder with a definition based on mathematical constants.
The breakthrough comes in time for the kilogram to be included in a broader redefinition of units — including the ampere, mole and kelvin — scheduled for 2018. And this week, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) will meet in Paris to thrash out the next steps.
“It is an exciting time,” says David Newell, a physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “It is the culmination of intense, prolonged efforts worldwide.”
[...] In 2011, the CIPM formally agreed to express the kilogram in terms of Planck’s constant, which relates a particle’s energy to its frequency, and, through E = mc2, to its mass. This means first setting the Planck value using experiments based on the current reference kilogram, and then using that value to define the kilogram. The CIPM’s committee on mass recommends that three independent measurements of Planck’s constant agree, and that two of them use different methods.
(Score: 3, Informative) by throwaway28 on Friday October 16 2015, @01:18AM
Altitude plays a part, no?
Balance scales are unaffected by local gravity. Spring scales and electronic scales are affected by local gravity. Some electronic kitchen scales say to recalibrate with a test mass if you change altitude. Looking for a reference to what NIST does, they /do/ measure local gravity when using their watt balance.
Gravity acceleration, g, is determined by a commercial gravimeter [15], which records the trajectory of a corner cube dropped in a vacuum. Figure 10 shows a graph for points from a typical measurement run. The continuous curve is from the tidal effects calculated from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) software [16] for our location, and must be subtracted from the data to obtain the local average, 9.80101933 m/s2.
(Ok, that's so last year (1998) ( http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/jres.110.003 [doi.org] http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/110/1/j110-1ste.pdf [nist.gov] ), but they probably still do something similar today.)