Measurement - Standards

Standards

With the exception of a few seemingly fundamental quantum constants, units of measurement are essentially arbitrary; in other words, people make them up and then agree to use them. Nothing inherent in nature dictates that an inch has to be a certain length, or that a mile is a better measure of distance than a kilometre. Over the course of human history, however, first for convenience and then for necessity, standards of measurement evolved so that communities would have certain common benchmarks. Laws regulating measurement were originally developed to prevent fraud in commerce.

Today, units of measurement are generally defined on a scientific basis, overseen by governmental or supra-governmental agencies, and established in international treaties, pre-eminent of which is the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), established in 1875 by the Treaty of the metre and which oversees the International System of Units (SI) and which has custody of the International Prototype Kilogram. The metre, for example, was redefined in 1983 by the CGPM as the distance traveled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second while in 1960 the international yard was defined by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa as being exactly 0.9144 metres.

In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the United States Department of Commerce, regulates commercial measurements. In the United Kingdom, the role is performed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), in Australia by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, in South Africa by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and in India the National Physical Laboratory of India.

Read more about this topic:  Measurement

Famous quotes containing the word standards:

    That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.
    Max Frisch (1911–1991)

    As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)