Standards
See also: Standard (metrology)Standards are objects or ideas that are designated as being authoritative for some accepted reason. Whatever value they possess is useful for comparison to unknowns for the purpose of establishing or confirming an assigned value based on the standard. The design of this comparison process for measurements is metrology. The execution of measurement comparisons for the purpose of establishing the relationship between a standard and some other measuring device is calibration.
The ideal standard is independently reproducible without uncertainty. This is what the creators of the “meter” length standard were attempting to do in the 19th century when they defined a meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to one of the Earth’s poles. Later, it was learned that the Earth’s surface is an unreliable basis for a standard. The Earth is not spherical and it is constantly changing in shape. But the special alloy meter bars that were created and accepted in that time period standardized international length measurement until the 1950s. Careful calibrations allowed tolerances as small as 10 parts per million to be distributed and reproduced in metrology laboratories worldwide, regardless of whether the rest of the metric system was implemented and in spite of the shortfalls of the meter’s original basis.
Read more about this topic: Metrology
Famous quotes containing the word standards:
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)
“Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“If one doesn’t know one’s own country, one doesn’t have standards for foreign countries.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)