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In for a penny, in for a ...
kilogram
By Rich Lewis May 29,
2003
While the rest of us are busy worrying
about the upcoming war with Iran, SARS, mad cow and West Nile
diseases, certain members of the scientific community are in a panic
about something more... uh... weighty.
While the rest of us are busy worrying
about the upcoming war with Iran, SARS, mad cow and West Nile
diseases, certain members of the scientific community are in a panic
about something more... uh... weighty.
The kilogram is
shrinking.
Sorry, but it's true. The Christian Science
Monitor last month, and the New York Times on Sunday, both reported
that Le Gran K - the little lump of platinum-iridium that is the
world's official standard for the kilogram - weighs less than it
used to.
This is apparently very bad news because whole
chunks of the metric system are tied to it.
In the wonderful
1982 movie, "The Time Bandits," a bunch of greedy dwarves endanger
all creation in their effort to acquire "The Most Fabulous Object in
the World." We never find out what it is, but they easily could have
been talking about the Gran K.
The cylinder sits in a heavily
guarded safe in a chateau in Sevres, France, near Paris. Only three
people have keys to the safe, and by the terms of an international
treaty signed in 1875, the anointed trio - accompanied by more armed
guards - must visit the LGK once a year. I wonder if they sing to it
or just stare at it.
Eighty copies of the LGK were made and
bestowed upon the countries that signed the treaty. Every once in a
long while, the copies are brought to Sevres and compared to the LGK
itself.
The last time that was done, not all the copies
agreed. They seemed to show that the LGK had lost 50 micrograms.
That's about the weight of a grain of sand - which may not sound
like much - and, in fact, isn't much - but the LGK is supposed to be
perfect, unchanging. It is, after all, supposed to be the ultimate
standard for how much things weigh.
Nobody knows what's going
on. Maybe the iridium is losing atoms or the copies are gaining
atoms. Some people think it has something to do with the Earth's
gravity. Maybe the perfidious French are fiddling with it when the
guards are having lunch. Whatever.
The plain fact is, I don't
care a dit. The kilogram could double or disappear altogether as far
as I'm concerned. Because I don't have a clue how much a kilogram
is. Oh sure, my college roommates used to buy bags of oregano or
catnip or something like that by the kilogram - or "key" as they
called it. It was puzzling because you couldn't cook or keep cats in
the dorm, so I don't know what they were doing with this stuff.
Maybe it was sachet. It did have a certain pleasing
aroma.
Anyway, the concept of "kilogram" just doesn't compute
in my mind. I do ounces and pounds.
Which makes me wonder:
Whatever happened to all that metric stuff anyhow?
It seems
that at one time we were being told that the United States was going
to be converted to metric in just a few years, and there was nothing
we could do about it. So instead of pounds, we'd have those unstable
kilograms, and feet would become meters and miles kilometers, and
gallons would be liters and temperatures Celsius and so
on.
Oh sure, you see some of that here and there. They don't
have a 100-yard dash in track anymore; it's now the 100-meter or
109.361-yard dash. Soft drinks and car engines come in liters,
whatever that means, although milk still comes in gallons and car
tires in inches.
For everyday life, the traditional measures
rule. When was the last time you told someone Newville was 17.7028
kilometers from Carlisle? Or that you just bought a nice
8,093.71-square-meter building lot for your new home? Which is two
acres.
In 1975, Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act,
which was supposed to put us on the road to a total metric
mindwashing. Ha. Here we are 28 years later still pounding and
inching along. Yes, in 1988, Congress ordered all federal agencies
to use metric in nearly all of their activities, but those are still
"mile markers" up there on I-81, not "kilometer markers."
The
United States stands proudly with Liberia and Burma as the only
three nations on Earth (which is about 25,000 miles in
circumference, not 40,233 kilometers) which have not made metric
their official measuring system.
And this is a good thing.
The metric system is boring and sterile, suitable only for
mathematicians and other colorless folk. Everything is ten or a
hundred or a thousand of something else. It lacks the human touch of
the inch ("the width of a thumb" or "three barleycorns") or the mile
(the distance covered by a Roman legionnaire walking 2,000
steps).
The division of the foot into a dozen inches instead
of the all-too-even 10 was not only imaginative and distinctive, it
also helped to ensure that generations of children would have to
learn the times-tables up to 12.
Further, remember that Le
Gran K is kept in France. Why? Because the French invented the
metric system in 1790. Imagine how bad we would feel now if were
committed to the metric system after what those snooty ingrates did
to us at the U.N.
So let the weight of that glob of
platinum-iridium fluctuate like some metallic Oprah Winfrey. Our way
of measuring is just fine.
Even if I'm not really sure what a
barleycorn is.
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