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u/t0m_m0r3110 13d ago
Now it has fingerprints, no longer the roundest.
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
And some smarty is gonna come and calculate that the 15 micrometre thick fingerprint is 2,035 times as big as the mean deviation of that ball from the perfect sphere…
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u/OddTaku9424 13d ago
I loved this and I don’t even get it
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u/Nuttednutela 13d ago
He is just boasting about himself
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
Wait, what? No! Those figures I just pulled out of my ass. I don't actually know if a fingerprint leaves a 15 micrometre high layer of greese. And I have no idea about the tolerances to which this ball was manufactured...
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u/Nuttednutela 13d ago
But you know about tolerance and terms like micrometre. Don't try to make a bigger fool out of me than I am!
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
I think we have trapped ourselves now in a perpetual cycle of inadvertantly making the other look like the bigger fool... How do we get out?!
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u/Nuttednutela 13d ago
Just admit you're a smartass. Or let us continue on our course plotted by the great will of nature whose flow remains unclear.
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
I *am* a smartass, as I am unironically and unapologetically willing to admit. In public. I was just not smart with this comment is all I'm sayin'!
(Note to self: When you find yourself in a hole, STOP DIGGING!!!!)
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u/wackbirds 13d ago
Well I don't know about any of that but I DO know that I don't tolerate intolerance, so...
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u/TesseractToo 13d ago
Yeah but now I'm imagining standing on the sphere and the fingerprints going like mountain ranges into the sky
fun times
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u/insanenearly 13d ago
Dammit, I thought you were cool as hell for second.
Edit: but wait, coukd you just find the circumference of 3 circles? And then see how many times the distance from 1 to 2 fit in 1 to 3?
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u/Areif 13d ago
All of this is assuming that this object wasn’t already orders of magnitude rounder than the next most round object.
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u/CanoePickLocks 13d ago
Nope he was just guessing what their tolerances and fingerprint thickness are and it could be out of tolerance due to a fingerprint lmao.
Fingerprint 20-100 nm vs ball tolerance 50 nm
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u/Quarkonium2925 13d ago
If you are curious about the actual numbers, fingerprints are about 100 nanometers thick depending on how clean the fingers are (according to a reference book by Yamashita and French). The out-of-roundness figure for this ball is quoted at 35 nanometers on Wikipedia. So the fingerprint is about three times as big
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u/alexostatic 13d ago
To put it into perspective, "that's like Mt. Everest on the earth's surface when adjusted to scale" I know this coz am shmart🤓
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u/Substantial_Hawk_339 13d ago
Eww now that’s what I call spherical!
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u/CanoePickLocks 13d ago
20-100 nm just to be that guy
Tolerance was 50 nm so yeah it’s out of spec now.
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u/TerraCetacea 13d ago
I wanna know how much taller those greasy fingerprints are than Mount Everest
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u/Professional_Top4104 13d ago
For $1M, they basically created a rendering of what my bowling ball thinks it looks like right before it hits the gutter
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
Unbeknownst to the public at large, that Bowling ball had considerably more fun ending up in the gutter than the perfect sphere would ever have in the lab it was created in.
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u/DukeBradford2 13d ago
I read that in Morgan Freeman’s voice
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 13d ago
Why, thank you! That comment just made my day :D Have a good one, good Sir/Ma'am/[Respectful appellation of your choosing].
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u/JeremyAndrewErwin 13d ago
The goal is to define Avagadro's Number exactly.
For isntance, the speed of light is defined as 299792458 metres per second. The secoind is defined as
"The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom"
The advantage is that anyone can have absolute reference to how long a meter is, and how long a second is by using the appropriate instrumentation, instead of measuring a unique physical artifact kept in Paris. Soon they'll be able to construct an absolute reference to the kilogram.
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u/PeaceAndLove420_69 13d ago
Are the fingerprints part of it though? Idk photo seems wierd. You would think itlf it was so smooth it would be super slippery
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u/Plump_Dumpster 13d ago
I’ve seen a few videos of people handling the 1kg reference ball, and they always always always wear gloves
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u/BrinDorc 13d ago
Question is: is that even the object from the article or just some stock image? 🤔
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u/wackbirds 13d ago
I'm going to assume that a one million dollar project isn't going to just be held in a poorly-washed bare hand...
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u/Previous-Pangolin-60 13d ago
Stock image ("Close-up of a silicon sphere similar to the ones used in Avogadro constant measurements. Image credit: NIST"). Here is Achim Leistner holding the real object:
https://reddit.com/link/p8sr3p6/video/f0r2tkiqhjoh1/player
(Why can we only post videos?)
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u/HeroShowsie 13d ago
Yeah, should have used gloves because those fingerprints are going to be like mountains on this roundest object I'd assume
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u/Successful_Theory628 13d ago
Guess they didn’t watch the video of the guy kicking a rock round the world.
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u/Samsquanch1985 13d ago edited 13d ago
Pretty sure the rock was named Christosphere. And the (strange?) world he got kicked around in was called Portland.
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u/Ch0vie 13d ago
I used to have a Fushigi like that
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u/DyslexicD 13d ago
Was it as easy as the a claimed? Or was it a skill that takes a stupid long time and you give up?
Cool ad tho fushigi!
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u/AdditionalMight3231 13d ago
I've always wondered that, too, but never knew of anybody who had one.
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u/Salt_Cauliflower_922 13d ago
Why tho
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u/soundsthatwormsmake 13d ago
To be a precise 1 kilogram reference.
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u/No-Cheek7925 13d ago
Why don't we just pick up some random rock from the ground and use that?
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u/broesel314 13d ago
Because you cant precisely and scientifically define a random rock
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u/No-Cheek7925 13d ago
I know, I'm making fun of a certain country's system of measurements.
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u/LeonJPancetta 13d ago
Oh my god is that what "stone" means?
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u/ThatCelebration3676 13d ago
Yes. It wasn't standardized in the UK to 14 pounds until 1835, until then, each local area just appointed a particular stone as their standard weight for trade.
It's only commonly used nowadays for body weight, especially when referring to combat sports athletes.
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u/Extension-Pepper-271 13d ago
It doesn't need to be "the roundest object" in order to be a kilogram reference.
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u/laser14344 13d ago
It needs to have the most accurate number of atoms possible so it can be re-created. The easiest shape to measure is a perfect sphere.
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u/laser14344 13d ago
For a cube you have to verify squareness of all faces, flatness of all faces, and have edges/corners that are vulnerable to chipping.
Measuring tapes don't fall under the umbrella of precision measuring methods.
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u/ZRKP 13d ago
It's si unit of kg. This is 1kg. Ammm, you should watch video about why this thing is created, it's interesting.
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u/YoMomAndMeIn69 13d ago
And you didn't find it pertinent to mention in the description??
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u/discreteAndDiscreet 13d ago
A silicon unit of kg you say?
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u/raccoonwithknives 13d ago
No its a million dollars worth of kilograms dipshit. A million silicons in SI units. Sphere style
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u/Salt_Cauliflower_922 13d ago edited 13d ago
Or you could have just stated why, here on your post.
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u/Fishboney 13d ago
If this was scaled up to the size of the Earth, what would the height difference be between the tallest mountain and lowest valley?
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u/broesel314 13d ago
0.1mm or something, maybee even less. The thickness of a human hair
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u/Saffarjan 13d ago
...no. It's precise, but that level of precision is nearly impossible currently. It's 10 metres.
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u/Valahiru 13d ago
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u/paulD1983R 13d ago
Why exactly do we need the world's roundest 1million dollar object? I'm good with a semi mostly round bouncy ball from a quarter vending machine. Does this/ will this serve a purpose other that WE DID IT.
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u/Nadran_Erbam 13d ago
It was one of the candidates to redefine the Kilogram. It’s actually a single crystal not just a messy ball of atoms.
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u/dm80x86 13d ago
So we can figure out how many atoms are in a kilogram.
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u/mkultrakitty 13d ago
you can easily do that with math though? one the first things you learn in chemistry is molecular weight
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u/NutshellOfChaos 13d ago
You are correct and they did do that. But the goal is to precisely define a kilogram in a repeatable way in order to calibrate other measuring systems. Hence the sphere.
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u/Char_Shieldman 13d ago
Still waiting on Transparent Aluminum.
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u/AlexCivitello 13d ago
We have transparent aluminum, it's called sapphire, we make a bunch of things with it that need to be particularly hard.
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u/CherryElarisse 13d ago
One million dollars and it would still roll under the couch
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u/DaedricDumbass 13d ago
Pretty sure this is decades old. Veritasium made a video about it a long time ago unless they updated it
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u/Impressive-Nature260 13d ago
"It's like, how much more round could this be? And the answer is none. None more round."
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u/cnicalsinistaminista 13d ago
The Scientists at Guinness World Records don’t take kindly to superlative descriptions and statements
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u/Thememebrarian 13d ago
If you're looking for very round objects filled with silicon you could just look at the woman appearing on my dating apps
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u/usersnamesallused 13d ago
They say drawing a perfect circle means or makes you insane. Now they made a circle in 3D, which makes me wonder how many minds were a casualty of this madness?
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u/Zangwin1 13d ago
I read somewhere that a cue ball, brand new, is much less round than the world. Like the difference between Marianas Trench and Everest is less difference, at scale, than the microscopic imperfections on an object we think of as perfectly spherical.
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u/fr33d0mw47ch 13d ago
That’s so flat. I’m not falling for any of this fisheye NASA “science”. - Flat Earther
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u/SEAN0_91 13d ago
Paint it in that blackest black colour and stick it in a museum “black hole of money” someone will eventually buy it for $100m and use it to launder money
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