--- Terry Blanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Theft in Paris?
>
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070912/ap_on_re_eu/shrinking_kilogram;_ylt=A0WTcUqtguhGTH8AhRms0NUE
>
> http://snipurl.com/1qtfk
>
> "By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer
> Wed Sep 12, 1:00 PM ET
>
> PARIS - A kilogram just isn't what it used to be.
>
> The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the
> metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is
> mysteriously losing weight if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard
> Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres,
> southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50
> micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies."
As a child, I literally grew up in a machine shop. Unlike your average
citizen today, who is generally an office worker, I am intimately
familiar with the "means of production". One of the first things I
remember as a little boy was that metals, especially freshly machined
metals, have a distinctive smell. It's pretty easy to tell steel from
brass, aluminum from copper and so on from their odors alone. As I grew
older, this seemed rather mysterious. With a rudimentary understanding
of the concept of vapor pressure, it seemed impossible.
Yet there it is. The damn metals smell anyway. Even though I have no
familiarity with smell of platinum-iridium alloy, I wouldn't be surprised
if that alloy as well has a distinctive odor. Obviously, if metals have
an odor, something is evaporating. Something is in the air for you to
smell that is given off by the surface of the metal. Is it a slow oxidation
with molecular size particles given off into the air? Who knows? But I
think its a safe bet that it has nothing to do with subatomic particles
or quantum physics.
This is one of those subjects that's been rattling around in the back of
my mind for decades, but I never really had an reason to say anything
about it before.
M.
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