Feels like a chicken and egg senario. Let’s say I get my torque wrench from work sent off to be calibrated, and that’s calibrated with something itself needs to be calibrated, and so on and so fourth. How’s that figured out?
In: 430
It used to be that we had physical objects that were by definition calibrated. Whenever we wanted to calibrate an instrument to the highest degree so we could use it to calibrate other instruments we would use this object to calibrate the instrument and by definition the object would be calibrated.
The issue with this was that these objects changed slightly over time. So the definition changed. For example when the master kilogram lost a tiny bit of weight over some time then the definition of the kilogram changed and all the calibrated instruments were now out of calibration.
In order to fix this we are now using the resault of carefully chosen experiments. So you can measure a physical property, such as the speed of light, and you will by definition know the resault, if you get a different resault it is because your instrument is out of calibration so you need to have it adjusted.
Feels like a chicken and egg senario. Let’s say I get my torque wrench from work sent off to be calibrated, and that’s calibrated with something itself needs to be calibrated, and so on and so fourth. How’s that figured out?
In: 430
It used to be that we had physical objects that were by definition calibrated. Whenever we wanted to calibrate an instrument to the highest degree so we could use it to calibrate other instruments we would use this object to calibrate the instrument and by definition the object would be calibrated.
The issue with this was that these objects changed slightly over time. So the definition changed. For example when the master kilogram lost a tiny bit of weight over some time then the definition of the kilogram changed and all the calibrated instruments were now out of calibration.
In order to fix this we are now using the resault of carefully chosen experiments. So you can measure a physical property, such as the speed of light, and you will by definition know the resault, if you get a different resault it is because your instrument is out of calibration so you need to have it adjusted.
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