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Exactly One Kilogram Of Silicon
Ed Pegg Jr writes "You may know of the importance of 299792458
for length, and 9192631770 for time. However, the official standard for weight is still a block of platinum/iridium made a hundred years ago. A group of scientists from the Avogadro Project are hoping to change that, though, by producing a perfect sphere of ultrapure silicon."
A perfect sphere would imply fractional quarks and fractional parts of quarks, and ... an infinite precision!
Pi is still irrational, isn't it?
Don't tell me the all my math teachers lied to me!
I'm tired of reassuring the coding standards people that, yes, such-and-such a pointer has been tested against the platinum/iridium void* kept in a vault in Paris.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
producing a perfect sphere of ultrapure silicon
Pam Anderson has already cornered this market.
Ohhhh, silicon...
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is a post really "informative" if it only informs the parent poster?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
We'll come up with our own standard of mass, and we'll call it the Freedom Sphere. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jacques Chirac! With your burned lips!
Get in here this INSTANT, and bring it with you! When your father gets home you are going to be grounded, young man! Two weeks to the PICOSECOND by the atomic clock in the kitchen. Now go stand in the corner, and NO LEANING! You'll probably throw the wall out of plumb, or expand the angle to 90.7632+1E degrees or something, you troublemaker!
Mod this up Informative!
I've always have this strange idea of a Austin Powers movie where DR EVIL has stolen the "Kilogram" and held the entire world hostage for one trillion pesos.
What an idea.
Still, just try getting a .75 centipace wrench. You can't even order them, and without that, just how the hell are you supposed to repair the flux capacitor?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Fun Silicon Ball.
Discontinue use of Happy Fun Silicon Ball if any of the following occurs:
- Chipping
- Scratching
- Spontaneous degeneration
- Conversion from matter to energy (E = mc^2 = c^2 energy!)
- Sudden change in mass of everything around you
Happy Fun Silicon Ball has been shipped to our troops in Kuwait and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq. Our Westernization process of SI imperialism will defeat them!When not in use, Happy Fun Silicon Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...
Do not taunt Happy Fun Silicon Ball.
Happy Fun Silicon Ball
Accept no substitutes!
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
because they would then need a standard unit for the value of "one thousand". Duhhhh!
Mod this up funny!
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
How do they keep the perfect sphere from rolling off the scale?
You put one on the table, and the perphect sfere sits on the hole.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
because then it wouldnt be big and cool looking. This way the scientists can toss it around and make geeky jokes at the expense of their silicon ball.
this is not a sig.
2.1.1.2 Unit of Mass (kilogram)
The international prototype of the kilogram, made of platinum-iridium, is kept at the BIPM under conditions specified by the 1st CGPM in 1889 (CR, 34-38) when it sanctioned the prototype and declared:
'This prototype shall henceforth be considered to be the unit of mass.'
The 3rd CGPM (1901: CR, 70), in a declaration intended to end the ambiguity in popular usage concerning the word 'weight' confirmed that:
The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.
But the English system goes by powers of two; e.g, 16 cups = 8 pints = 4 quarts = 2 half gallon = 1 gallon.
... 768? Aw, crap!
= 128 ounces = 256 tablespoons = 768 teaspoons =
Water is roughly 1000 kg/m^3; it's also roughly 1 g/cm^3 which is how I originally learned the ratio (there are 10^6 cm^3 in a m^3).
I went to public US junior and senior high schools, all the science I learned there was taught using the metric system. Imperial-metric conversions were the very first thing we were taught in junior high school science. The only exception I recall was for temperature, in which Celcius was usually used but we occasionally slipped into degrees Fahrenheit early on. High school Chemistry and Physics were taught only in degrees Celcius or in Kelvins. This was in the 1980s, if that matters.
in other words, I DID read the thing, and they're using nitrogen-doped-silicon to suppress, what was it ? spiral .. swirl defects, so the sphere isn't pure crystalline silicon, to begin with, AND...
they're measuring it by diameter, which isn't, I'd a' thought, the perfect way to discover how many atoms are in the object, and
they're using IT as a reference, so therefore they are using the object as a reference, so changes in mass ( due to some infinitesimally teensy amount being acquired-from or lost-to its cradle ) could affect it, hence my original assumpion that fluorine-sealed diamond would be the ideal tray-surface to hold the thing on ( hence my assumption of non-spherical-form'd be practically best ).
I give up...
I was wrong to have thought or questioned.
They Know[tm]
Cheers.
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