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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 1, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

David Newell

"Defining Fundamental Constants of Nature: The New SI"

ABSTRACT -- The International System of Units (SI from the French Le Système International d'Unités) is the universally accepted method of expressing physical measurements for world commerce, industry, and science. Though officially established in 1960, the origins of the present SI can be traced back to the creation of the decimal Metric System during the French Revolution. The SI has proven to be a living, evolving system, changing as new knowledge and measurement needs arise, and once again international consensus is building to advance the SI to reflect contemporary understanding of the physical world. The new framework of the future SI will no longer be based on definitions of units such as the meter, kilogram, and second. Instead it will adopt exact values for seven fundamental constants of nature upon which all SI units will be realized. Gone are the base units and their definitions.

SPEAKER -- David B. Newell received his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in mathematics from the University of Washington and his Ph. D. in Physics from the University of Colorado. He was awarded a NRC post-doctoral fellowship to work on the NIST watt balance project in Gaithersburg, MD, and became a full time staff member in 1996. In 2000 he joined the NIST Microforce Realization and Measurement project for measurement and realization of micro- and nano-scale forces traceable to the SI system of units. From 2004 to 2010 he assumed the responsibilities as leader of the Fundamental Electrical Measurements group of the Quantum Electrical Metrology Division and in 2006 he joined the CODATA Task Group on Fundamental Constants. He is currently working with a NIST team constructing a new watt balance to realize the kilogram from a fixed value of the Planck constant. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Philosophical Society of Washington, and chair for the CODATA Task Group on Fundamental constants.



Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov