beamjockey | Mass Media Attention for Richard Steiner

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I always like to see a pal in the news. Especially a college pal.

Dick Steiner (in the photo above, the intelligent-looking one) has gotten some press attention (not for the first time) in an L.A. Times piece on the cutthroat battle over a new standard for the kilogram. Well, I may be exaggerating about the cutthroat part.

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Dick is a member of a team developing an electrical measurement to replace Le Grand K, the old-fashioned metal mass that has embodied the kilogram since 1878.

Just outside a sealed chamber situated on a lonely corner of the NIST grounds, Steiner laid his wallet and wristwatch on a wooden desk. The magnetic field in the room was strong enough to erase the magnetic strips on his credit cards and stop the gears in his watch.

The elfish 53-year-old physicist with graying light brown hair pulled aside the heavy door and stepped into the warm glow of the room, sheathed in shiny copper plates to shield out radio and radar waves. Wires threaded across the walls.

At the heart of the chamber hummed Steiner's hulking machinery he hopes will lead to the next kilogram -- a two-story device with a pair of superconducting magnets the size of fire hydrants.

If you're curious about using a "watt balance" to establish a kilogram standard, take a look at the streaming video of Dick's colloquium talk here at Fermilab last summer. It was quite good. And here are his Powerpoint slides.