Saturday, January 29, 2011
Metrology notes
Polistra is a fan of metrology, so when WUWT carried an article about a major standard of measure losing its standardness, her imagination was engaged.
In a vault beneath a 17th-century pavilion on the outskirts of Paris sits a platinum cylinder known as Le Grand K. Since 1889 it has been the international prototype for the kilogram, the standard against which all other kilos are measured.
"It's a scandal that we've got this kilogram hanging around changing its mass and therefore changing the mass of everything else in the universe!" Bill Phillips, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, exclaimed at a scientific summit in London this week. No one knows for sure what went wrong with Le Grand K, but some theorize it lost weight from being cleaned.
Labels: Metrology
¶ 10:56 AM
