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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: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 16 2015, @06:05AM
I pointed out how a unit longer than my foot isn't more or less "meaningful" than the distance between the floor and your belly button. You see the meaning you want to see, others used to the other system see their basic unit equally as meaningful. It's arbitrary and it doesn't really matter.
You think the human body temperature is a good 100, many others think that 0-100 as a range for liquid water is pretty darn convenient. Again, it doesn't really matter, you get used to the arbitrary convention. -20 is too cold, and 120 or 45 is too darn hot...
What matters though, is that the metric system is internally consistent. It's 10 of this, or 10^n of that, as specified by the unit's name. Not 12x here, 16x there, 3x for that other, and whatever the F#$& a mile is in inches, or a ton in ounces.
The rest of the world is Metric, except for the UK pining to be different, and whatever needs to be exported to the US (and Liberia and Myanmar, but not for much longer). Sure there are way too many 7-eleven in Taiwan, but they sell metric-labelled products (even if, as a good unofficial colony, they used bloody 110V).
Clothes sizes for women are in an arbitrary ever-changing unit, which puts imperial to shame for resisting evolution. :o)
Men's clothes, in most of he countries I've been to, are in metric.
I've spent well over half of my life outside of the US. "In college" is cute: people keep telling me they've taken a "few years" of one of the languages I speak "back in college", and can't ever remember more than five words of it.
Oh, and Americans shouldn't be allowed to say E=mc2 unless they have memorized the constant that's missing to actually make it correct in imperial units.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @02:37PM
In other words, you're too stupid to recognize your own ignorance and would rather post elitist bullshit to reinforce the group think rather than admit that somebody else has a point.
And, no, the rest of the world isn't metric. For example China is as metric as the US is, and really, not even as metric. They've got 3 systems of measures that they use, good luck buying clothes there without specifying sizes in inches.
Unlike you, I've used both systems long enough to actually understand how they work and the benefits of doing so. The fact that I've gone back to imperial measures says something about how much metric sucks. There's no reason why I couldn't be doing my cooking and such in metric measures. There are metric cookbooks out there and metric measurement tools out there. I don't generally use entire containers of things when cooking, so I wouldn't be using those.
The fact is, that metric just sucks for cooking and other things that people actually do, and no amount of whitewashing and hand waving is going to change that. The "benefits" that you're relying on are things that people just don't do with any regularity. And in exchange for the "benefits" you wind up with units that are inconvenient and ill-conceived of.
But yeah, feel free to keep drinking the kool-aid there. It's always nice the way you metric boosters can't bother to withhold the anti-Americanist jealousy that we have a working system of measures and aren't interested in converting to such a stupid set of measures.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Friday October 16 2015, @05:02PM
> Unlike you, I've used both systems long enough to actually understand how they work and the benefits of doing so.
Somebody doesn't read the threads he/she replies to.
> The fact is, that metric just sucks for cooking and other things that people actually do, and no amount of whitewashing and hand waving is going to change that.
The best part of 7 billion people agree with your point of view, and are awaiting your donations before they starve. Most have spent the last 50+ years hanging on to traditional tins cups so that they can try to pass grandma's recipes onto their children, and praying that the metric police doesn't discover great-grandpa's school ruler behind the firewood stacks. Buildings have been capped off at three stories to avoid the risk of metric-based collapse, and all speed signs are just being ignored for everyone's safety.
You are correct, I'm an idiot.