Disseminating the New Kilogram: An International ‘Dry Run’ (nist.gov)

Don't watch the video on mobile if you are bandwidth limited. It's 628MB for a 2 minute video.

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Wow the was... bad. I can get scientists want to bring SciFi to life, but this is a stretch.

In the second Artemis Fowl book, there is a centaur who uses a human laptop (magical creatures live in a technologically advanced society underground), and the first thing he does is mute it. He complains that humans are unevolved and have some sort of compulsion to make their products emit sounds and and lights.

At first I thought, "Oh, these sound effects are kinda cool, to give the video a flair for the dramatic." There's not going to be any noise inside of the vacuum, but the initial sound effects were probably the noises that the contraption would make if it had air to propagate the sound waves.

But, as the video went on, the sounds effects just go more and more ridiculous. An alarm sound as the object is sent down a tube?! And the coup de grace was the lawn mower sound effect at the very end as the object was wheeled away.

It says under the video "All sound effects added; the actual process is extremely quiet."

At 2:04 I'm pretty sure I hear the sound of a Chrysler sliding door autolock.

Not directly, but my research group has used referenced masses and a former colleague works on the NIST watt balance.

In commodity analysis, I depend on the mere existence and cascading chain of trust descending from this exact NIST kilogram, or any other NIST mass standard that may come along.

This is a tremendous benefit even if I am not required to make my mass measurements anywhere near the level of precision which NIST is capable of itself discerning. My target for precision is simply to be measurably better than the next best operator. NIST gives a final reference against which the quality of measurement can be correctly judged.

I have personally certified many billions of dollars worth of cargo in a way which is traceable to the NIST mass standard in particular, more so than most other single-handed individuals by far. Naturally, I started early which was an unfair advantage, but I recognized the need for traceability to a primary unquestionable standard, especially when I'm advancing the underlying measurement technologies in ways which are not being published or would be difficult for less experienced operators to grasp. From an extreme viewpoint, the only alternative would be to otherwise rely on superstition.

Turns out, without knowing it, I have spent years focused on avoiding the kind of difficulties that Theranos appears to be involed in, with their emerging testing technology in their field of analysis.

I prefer my results to be traceable to NIST before they emerge from the lab.

Insurance companies have always gotten a lot more upset over a slightly incorrect result in my field compared to the field of routine blood work.

I'm not actually sure what you're insinuating here. Previously the standard WAS the "international prototype kilogram", all of which have drifted since creation (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Stability_of_the_inte... )

The problem with this is it isn't even fragile, it's _not reproducible_. The worst part is that other SI units depend on the kilogram, so they all change as this drift occurs! After a certain amount of time, how will we know what a "real" kilogram is? See here for discussion of this SI problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Dependency_of_the_SI_...

The point of the watt balance approach is to make it possible for a lab to reproduce the kilogram without another kilogram reference. That's what this is about, and I don't really think it's embarrassing. I think it's very, very hard.

That's very neat. It relies on the accuracy of the electrical current measurements, though; it's not an absolute measurement from fundamental physics.

For that, NIST has a fundamental standard for the standard volt.[1] So the fundamental standards now are time (atomic clock), the speed of light in vacuum, and the standard volt. The meter is now defined in terms of the speed of light in vacuum and a time.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2013/04/primary-voltag...