Get Ready For The New Ampere

I'm going to want my power bill recalculated.

ents but it looks like the 70+ -year-old definition for the Ampere is final ly going to be formally tied to the number of electrons going by per second rather than the hypothetical (so far experimentally unmeasurable) force be tween two parallel conductors:

yet but they seem to think it can be done on an easily-replicated "NIST on a chip" by 2018

ass recalls of consumer electronics...

I had to introduce a speaker from the University of New South Wales who was giving a public lecture on his chip that did the single electron-counting job.

He managed to give the entire lecture without mentioning that he had to kee p his within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero before it could, and I did heckle him about it in question time afterwards.

The American National Institute of Standards aren't the only people working on the project.

If it was defined by the number of electrons going through a wire in the

We didn't change the definition of the meter to be a number of wavelengths of an atomic vibration until we could measure that and we picked the type of atom as one we could measure.

"formally"?? i had thought that the amp was defined by the number of electrons going by per second; at least since around 50 years ago...

The kilogram is still defined by a physical object, thought there are a couple of other intrinsic methods whose repeatability is approaching the required accuracy to take over. The one I'm acquainted with is a hand polished spherical single crystal of isotopically pure Si28. It's the most spherical object ever made. We know the bond length in the crystal, and can measure the diameter and sphericity extraordinarily accurately, which means we know the number of atoms.

It is believed that the original kg standard may be losing mass, and no-one knows why. But every time it's weighed against one of its 39 lesser siblings, it's more likely to come up a little short. They're all stored in a similar way, though in sites around the world.

Clifford Heath.

Maybe it's related to the accelerating expansion of the universe? That energy has to come from somewhere.

Its siblings are in an alternate universe?

:) No, but they travel more. Relative to Earth, of course. Perhaps they gain energy as they're moved through a gravitational field. Hmm, gravity drag, that should drop a spanner in someone's theory.

Clifford Heath.

So the expansion if different in the Paris region in France than in other location of our Earth.

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From cutting lines of gravitational force?

You're thinking of Maxwellian equations to describe gravity:

That article keeps changing as various people champion the efforts of one or another whacko excuse-me-I-meant "brave new paradigm challenger" but it has useful references.

Some parts have been confirmed, others not so much. I think the worst pro blem is that mass stubbornly refuses to be quantized like charge is.

As for the mass of the Paris prototype and all of its clones not quite ma tching up, it seems to depend on when you compare them. It might be prudent to perform a mass spectroscopy of each to make sure somebody hasn't scarfe d some of the platiridium and replaced it with a tungsten alloy or somethin g. Either that, or the standard and its clones are actually accumulating di fferent amounts of surface contaminants like carbon and mercury:

Mark L. Fergerson

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There's definitely more baffle-gab created in Paris than anywhere else. I b lame the French education system, which seems hell-bent on training people to sound impressive - in French - and is less attentive to more practical s kills. Cambridge was bad, but Paris was even worse.

Presumably the French standard kilogram looks more impressive than it is - overloaded with spin when in Paris, and less so after being shipped away to the provinces.

IIRC the Platinum alloy meter bars were coming up short too. It doesn't matter anymore I suppose.

For that matter, how did they measure couloumbs ?

On Monday, August 29, 2016 at 9:43:08 PM UTC-7, Robert Baer wrote: ...

No - the Ampere is defined by the force created by a wire in a magnetic field..

kevin

By electroplating silver onto a cathode. I think that Faraday was the pioneer there. Coulomb was more into electrostatics.

• Chemically; read your history. Iffin eye memburr rite, plating silver was the basic trick and defining X electrons per microgram of plated silver.

So how do you get Avagadro's number and the unit weight of the silver atoms to calculate the count from the weight? There's something fishy with this story.

You should be able to derive the mass of individual silver ions from a beam of silver ions and a known field.