Bennett L. Rouse

On a lighter note

I spent the majority of last week recovering from a fever that had been bogging me down since the first day of school. There was little that could make me smile under the surplus of make-up work that had conglomerated over the span of a week. However, surprisingly enough, I found a little bit of humor in something as stoic as my Physics textbook. The text is not even remotely humorous at first glance, but upon further investigation, it?s freaking hilarious (just bear with the "theme" of the text, don't even bother to worry about the concepts at hand):

"The meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second... The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom... The standard of mass is now the least satisfactory. Unlike the operational definitions of length and time, which are based on procedures that can be repeated by scientists anywhere, the unit of mass is defined in terms of a particular object... The prototype kilogram is made of a special platinum-iridium alloy that is very hard, not subject to corrosion and very dense. Nevertheless, it could conceivably change, and in any event comparison with such a standard is less convenient than an operational definition that can be checked in a laboratory. So scientists are working on techniques based on counting the number of silicon atoms in a given volume, to scale up from the mass of a single atom to a new definition of the kilogram."-Essential University Physics, Richard Wolfson

There are a plethora of items that scientists measure every day, especially using the kilogram unit. However, if we have gone this far in time without scientifically proving that the kilogram does indeed weigh a kilogram, I think we'll live. In fact, I think we were set once we discovered that "the meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." I am not an expert by any means concerning this research, but I am pretty sure that this number has quite enough digits to pass around for consumers to ensure that their meter sticks are indeed a meter long.

On a lighter note, couldn't this same type of technology be used to figure out how to project food into the mouths of starving children in third world countries around the globe from across the ocean? That's just a suggestion, but it's probably nowhere near as important as symbolizing the equivalent of the kilogram (which we defined a solid three centuries ago) in the laboratory to show off just how savvy technology is today.

Posted at 03:34PM Sep 03, 2008 by Bennett L. Rouse in General  |  Comments[2]