But he says it may be possible to do it for the kilogram by measuring the distance between atoms in crystals of silicon.
He adds that there should be little difficulty in gaining another tenfold improvement in accuracy.īut what of other units? Is it realistic to try to base the kilogram on time measurements, for example, now that this has been done for the meter? Evenson says he can't imagine how to do this for degrees of temperature or amperes of electric current. Already, he says, the standard meter is 10 times as accurate as when it was based on the wavelength of krypton light. The work of Evenson and his colleagues at the NBS laboratory in Boulder, Colo., helped encourage the General Conference on Weights and Measures to adopt the new definition of the meter. Since the measurement of frequency is directly linked to the measurement of time, the accuracy of frequency measurements, and hence the precision of the standard meter, now is tied directly to the precision of the atomic clock, the most precise of all present standards for weights and measures.
And since wavelength is accurately calculated from the light's frequency, a metrologist has only to count the appropriate number of fringes - that is, the appropriate number of wavelengths - to lay out a standard meter, Evenson explains. The spacing of these fringes is directly related to the wavelength of the light. Then, with the use of a mirror, this light can be made to interact with itself to produce a characteristic pattern of bright and dark lines called fringes. And frequency, Evenson says, can be measured 1, 000 to 10,000 times as accurately as can wavelength.Ī laser provides the kind of pure, stable light source needed for this precision work. The wavelength of light is related mathematically to its frequency - wavelength is just the speed of light divided by frequency. The key tool in tying the meter to the second is the laser. The krypton meter was accurate to about 4 parts in a billion. It can be measured to better than one part in 10,000 billion. Evenson of the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS). ''The main reason for doing this is that the second is the most accurate of all the base units,'' explains Kenneth W. This search for ever-greater precision is what has driven metro-logists to base the unit of length on the second rather than on an actual physical distance. Now this standard has also become too imprecise for the needs of science. So the meter was redefined to be 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red light emitted by a krypton-86 lamp (krypton-86 being one of several forms of that element). By 1960, however, this had become much too crude for the precision measurements of physicists and astronomers. It once was literally the distance between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar kept by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. Up to now, that standard has basically been a length. Even the light-year is referenced ultimately to the standard meter. But that has not hitherto been the case for the standard basic units (such as meter, kilogram, second, or ampere) which, by international agreement, underlie all other systems of measurement. The light-year, by which they specify the distance to a star, is the distance light travels in a year. Someday the kilogram, for example, may also be based on time.Īstronomers have long been accustomed to using time to define a unit of length with the help of the speed of light. Thus the units of length used to describe the height of a mountain or the reach of your forearm are tied directly to the second. The meter now is officially defined as the distance light travels, in vacuum, in the incredibly short time span of one second divided by 299,762,458. In doing this, the conference has taken a giant step toward simplifying our system of weights and measures so that at least some of the basic units are based directly on time.
20, it gave the world a more accurate standard of length, in which the meter now is derived from the color of a laser beam with the help of the agreed-upon light speed. Yet in adopting a fixed value for the speed of light, the General Conference on Weights and Measures is not trying to preempt nature. The value of this fundamental natural constant has been arbitrarily set by international fiat. There's no ambiguity about it, none of those ''error bars'' with which scientists indicate the uncertainties inherent in every measurement. The speed of light is exactly 299,762,458 meters per second.