The Business Chat: The nature of reality and other weighty matters

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our regular Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Fleur Francois, director at New Zealand’s national metrology institute and Karyn Scherer, senior copywriter at Callaghan Innovation.

It's been a big year in international measurement. A number of the big measures we rely on every day, and for the accurate use of more things in our lives than you might imagine, have swapped out, or are in the process of doing so. The kilo is a famous measure, kept under glass and lock and key in France,that’s changing from an actual lump of metal to being kept by quantum measurements based off fundamental laws of physics so as not to change.It turns out that up to now every now and again the kilo mass shifted and so would all measurements, kind of bananas to think of it.

It's also been a big anniversary for another standard, standard time. Did you know, and I'm not trying to catch you out if you didn't, that NZ was the first place in the world to adopt standard time, adopting Greenwich mean time as our base measure, before England even did. It's a great story of parochialism and vision all at once, and we were a staggering 15 years ahead of anywhere else. The 150th anniversary of that also passed this year. So to chat time, measure and the nature of reality, we're joined on the pod by Fleur Francois, director at New Zealand’s national metrology institute, Measurement Standards Laboratory (MSL), and Karyn Scherer of Callaghan Innovation.

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