Weighty Matter

Have you ever wanted to buy a Kibble Balance, Dear Reader? Trying to find one with Mr. Google invariably brings up pages of dog food suppliers, which is no help for it is indeed the tool that we are supposed to use for benchmarking the Kilogram from now on. So, what even is one? Behold:

A Kibble Balance in the wild.
You can build this baby with LEGO®!

And benchmarking the kilogram. What's that when it's at home? It seems that weighing devices like kitchen scales need to be calibrated because it's The Law and swindlers are always out to fleece you. Well, not really, but everything needs to be accurate these day and what it says on the box; else life is just guesswork.

Hence this Frankenstein's monster of electromagnetic [over-]engineering is all the rage these days and Governments are spending millions of pesos building their own in order to have the last word on the kg. Who knew? In typical fashion, scientific-types say tra la, build your own for it is no big deal, and point to a youtubes tutorial on building one with LEGO bricks. Can you imagine? 

If you have you been keeping up with the news, this story would be old hat but I had been caught unawares about the revolution in the realisation of our base units of measurement* owing to my on-off-sometimes news embargo. Luckily, four years ago Dear Brother sent me the article, "The kilogram is dead; long live the kilogram". 

Trust me when I say that I'm more or less up to speed now & I have some Opinions about it all. Shaking up our scientific foundations like this is just the sort of Weighty Matter (hem hem) which occasionally leads to sleepless nights and self-medicating with doses of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral. Not owing to breathless excitement about it all, mind, rather hand-wringing consternation that we are in the embrace of scientific hubris.

Why, what, hubris?! For surely scientific progress in Metrology, the Science of Measuring Stuff, is meant to lead us out of a primitive wilderness where we once felt our way about our world with arbitrary benchmarks such as king's feet and grains of cereal**? Fudge-work and approximation begone!

The artefact formerly known as the Kilogram

To be sure, the French Revolution did usher in a brave new metric world and brought us Le Grand K, an elegant cylinder of platinum alloy that lives in a nest of bell jars in a vault in Saint-Cloud (patron saint of carbuncles and gout) in Paris, and which from 1795 was the physical prototype to represent the kilogram, newly defined as the mass of 1000 cubic centimetres of water at 4 degrees Celsius***. 

And you might think, like I, that this is very neat and tidy and praise be, &c. And isn't it marvellous that dozens of copies of the elegant platinum ur-kilogram have been made and distributed about the globe (Australia's national prototype lives at the National Measurement Institute in Sydney) and are the calibration benchmarks for measuring the mass of just about everything.

But the lofty ideal of these Revolutionaries that standardising measurements for all men, for all time didn't foresee the advent of, ahem, quantum mechanics. As science got more exciting, boffins wanted to decouple these olde ways of measuring the world with tangible artefacts like handy copies of Le Grand K into something rather more cerebral and release mankind from the tyranny of, you know, being the laughing stock of the universe for, say, weighing stuff with lumps of metal instead of physics. (Yes, boffins on the interwebs do say aliens would laugh at us.)

Lo!, our trusty metric system of measurement has now been completely overhauled, and the seven base units of the International System of Units (SI) have been redefined by natural physical constants and each other. The kilogram was the last base unit to be redefined and for several years now is defined in terms of the second and the metre, via h, the Planck constant. So it's all now about the speed of light and whatnot!

As you can see in the natty relationship schematic above****, it's an elegant and pretty system befitting the elegance of science. But, the kg lost its easy-to-visualise and -handle metric definition to an equation both confusing and beyond the scope of Your Correspondent to properly understand let alone put into sensible words - even interweb boffins scoff at one another's attempts to explain!

Luckily, it seems you can construct a kilogram equivalent with plain physics, and the various National Institutes of Measurement propose to use the aforementioned Kibble balance to make it so. And that, Dear Reader, is why anyone might want one. And will by necessity have to build one, since not even Mr. Bezos has one to sell you (it seems we've forgotten the for all men creed). *****

But ...

What about the Law of Unintended Consequences?

What if the end-of-days comes and the electricity is switched off forever and we're sitting about in the New Dark Ages? Even a LEGO Kibble balance will be useless, for it needs a couple of battery-run laser pointers and hooking up to some computer software, via, you know, a power point. Much less the handful of multi-million peso white elephant Kibble balances that have a whole viper's nest of power cords to plug in. 

And if we need to reinvent basic commerce again, measuring out food and materials on two-arm balance scales, a nugget of platinum is just the ticket to check a scale against swindlers. Mind we don't toss the precious platinum babies out with the bathwater in our haste to make measuring stuff elegant and futuristic and founded on the laws of physics, for we are as sure as onions going straight back to an arbitrary world of measuring said world with autocratic body parts and seeds and shells.

Stock up on the tools of the trade now &
You'll become a High Priest of Metrology!

This is all rather doom-and-gloom, I know, and along the way I've discovered interesting things: for inst., among the end-of-civilisation preppers, there are some stockpiling things like triple beam balances and spring-based scales, Pyrex measuring jugs and tape-measures and whatnot. Like the scribe who will be required for the functionally illiterate being churned out of our education systems, the home-metrologist with the locked vault of calipers and balances and measures will join the elite ranks of the mystery cults when the batteries in everyone's digital bathroom scales and whatnot go kaput.

And even if this over-wrought future does not come to pass, (the mind does go to strange places when insomnia takes a grip), at the very minimum science as a school subject will become even more baffling to kids and there'll be even less able teachers coming through the ranks. If we all thought we once knew what a kilogram meant in principle, that's now gone out the window. Science has become hard again.

Not to mention that the egalitarian principles about weights and measures have been theoretically taken back from the everyman into the hands of the elite (read countries with the $$ and institutions to make this stuff mysterious again).

I did express these concerns in email communications with a Guv'ment metrologist at Australia's NMI, and asked for specifics about the destiny of our copy of Big K, and a whole suite of other pertinent questions, alongside philosophical questions relating to the obvious folly of relying on the need for the electricity to be switched on to define the kilogram. 

The boffin assigned to my impertinence was stubbornly mute on the salient points and made general noises about science being exciting and hard work and much $$ and waiting with interest while "international partners" get on with it and at least 10 years &c. &c. 

Reading between the lines, this country's Guv'ment is sitting on its hands and hoping to buy cheap versions off-the-shelf one day (with some custom finishes, obv, for that's how we roll in this land) and if the world goes to hell-in-a-handbasket in the meantime, we'll be sitting pretty with our copy of Le Grand K and crowing about foresight.

But I think the last word should go to Mr. Marcus P. Foster, a now-retired researcher at the CSIRO who some years ago published a paper on the future of the SI: "It is easy to conceive of a shiny new logical, consistent, unambiguous quantity and unit system. Admittedly, introducing such a creation would be expensive and difficult, and it would likely become the Esperanto of unit systems, admired but ignored." Phew! So much for a weighty matter. I've been losing sleep over nothing then.

* Viz. the second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela.

** And still used today in such diverse and obscure things like measuring shoe sizes and humidity and gold fineness and archer's arrows!

*** The metre being defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the Paris meridian (and a whole other story).

**** Yes, yes, the mole is sitting on its Pat Malone in this schema but it is defined by the Avogadro constant and see how nicely it closes the heptagon.

***** So don't forget to add LEGO to the Xmas wish list!

Image credits: 1: Rijksmuseum; 2: NIST; 3-5: via Google

Middle Earth: A Driving Holiday

 

Toot toot! The Pipistrellos took a trip ...

It has been an absolute age since the Pipistrellos flew from the confines of this island nation to take a trip together and, it being the Season for Scorpios and all and Mr. P thus ripe for spoiling with a holiday, what better place to choose to go than our than our nearest neighbour, Middle Earth*?

... Into a remote & pristine world more familiar with Quests

We're home now, Dear Reader, so let me show you all!

A land of glacial valleys green ...

That hoary old chestnut, "New Zealand: three hours ahead, thirty years behind!" stands no truck in this household & certainly no longer applies to this sparklingly modern and marvellous country where we have enjoyed several fabulous holidays during our married life. 

... And tussocky gold.

But we were angling for a sort of vintage planes/trains/automobiles experience this time because, well, we're old fogeys now and that's what tickles our fancy these days, so do avert your gaze if you are hoping for tell-all accounts of Bungy jumping** and white-water rafting and careering off mountain tops on bicycles and whatnot.

Lake Wanaka

For those who've never visited the Land of the Long White Cloud, the scenery on offer in the South Island, where we tootled about for ten days, is like Canada and Scandinavia and Scotland rolled into one, minus the polar bears and Northern Lights. (Of course, having never been to either Canada or Scandinavia disqualifies me from making such comparisons but I've seen the pictures.) 

Lake Tekapo

Clutha River

Think alpine lakes, snow-capped peaks, (wilding conifer) forests, rushing waterways, vast unrolling green glacial valleys and, being springtime, swathes of lupins, heather, gorse and broom, while invasive pest species, adding riotous injections of colour to the countryside.

Crystal clear and chilly waters filled with trout and salmon

More mountains :)

The towns are similarly resplendent in early November with every imaginable colour of rhododendron, peony, iris and rose making merry. Plump and towering poplars and thick willows with bobbed haircuts snake about both the towns and countryside adding to the European feel. Just gorgeous against a blue sky and snowy ridgelines holding out against Spring's warming temperatures!

Overnight cruise on Fiordland National Park's Doubtful Sound

Middle Earth has a real problem with introduced pestilential flora and fauna but at this time of year, the sweeping vistas taking in green grassy or yellow tussocky paddocks of sheep, gambolling lambs and grazing deer against pink and purple and yellow tinted rolling hills & valleys and sharp and craggy mountains tossing down waterfalls are both bucolically beautiful and discombobulating.

The chilly tannic waters of the fiord drop sharply
... to over 400 metres deep!

Especially so when it's only 2000km away from a flat and mostly dusty, yellow continent wherein every critter wants to sink its fangs into you and only a fule would ever lay down on a patch of "grass" in the countryside without poking at it with a stick for lurking spiders, scorpions, ants, ticks, snakes &c. &c.***

We saw fur seals, two varieties of penguin and bottle-nose dolphins
on Doubtful Sound. No whales spotted but 'twas the season.

And coming as we do from said flat-dusty-yellow continent we tend to stand like slack-jawed yokels before towering mountain ranges whenever they hove into view and hence the preponderance of pics of such.

Even disembarking at Queenstown airport stops us in our tracks

At this juncture, I was going to say Enough of the Nature Notes and toss in a few pics of vintage vehicles, but this posting is sufficiently long enough. However, to answer the burning question, did we come back with any souvenirs from Middle Earth? Why yes, we did: a few more tea-towels to add to the third drawer down and a dose each, finally, of the pox. Drats.

* Well, our touring about principally stuck to skirting the countryside around Rivendell, Dimrill Dale, the River Anduin, Fangorn Forest and the Pelennor Fields as far as I can tell. Like Frodo & Chums, we neglected to take a map with us, and anyways, even if there were signposts to check, I read only English.

** Although, seen on the aeroplane coming home was a silver-haired septuagenarian-ish-looking couple sporting pristine t-shirts emblazoned with the name of New Zealand's pioneering Bungy company, so try tracking them down instead to get the low down on elderly adrenalin-seekers.

*** Of course, New Zealand keeps its hobbits on their hairy toes with the similarly thrilling prospect of fiery volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, hem hem.

Image credits: 1: via Pinterest; all else: Flying With Hands