video thumbnail 9:49
How We're Redefining the kg

2017-07-12

[public] 2.34M views, 82.6K likes, 1.08K dislikes audio only

channel thumbVeritasium

In 2018 the kg will be defined by Planck's constant, not a hunk of metal.

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Special thanks to the staff at NIST who made this possible: Darine Haddad, Jon Pratt, Stephan Schlamminger, and Ben Stein.

Additional footage and animations by Sean Kelley, Jennifer Lauren Lee, and Frank Seifert.

I have been obsessed with measurement for a long time and I'm not sure quite how it happened. The world's roundest object played a role in this. I guess I'm just fascinated by how difficult it is to pin down a quantity like a kilogram. A physical object seemed like a good idea until the mass of the international prototype kilogram wasn't as constant as expected. These methods of the Kibble balance and silicon sphere have shown better precision than 20 parts per billion, making them superior to the old method. The agreement between Avogadro approaches

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Interferometer video by TSG Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-u3IEgcTiQ

Music from http://epidemicsound.com "ExperiMental1" by Gunnar Johnsén

Studio filming by Raquel Nuno


World's Roundest Object! by Veritasium
/youtube/video/ZMByI4s-D-Y
Intro
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The kilogram
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The metre
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How this works
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The two approaches
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Kibble Balance
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Weighing Mode
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Velocity Mode
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Watt
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Voltage
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Plancks Constant
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The kilogram in 2018
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