Most of the world uses the metric system to weigh and measure. We do not, here in the States; it’s not ‘Murican and we ain’t a gonna do it, nosiree! We prefer our own customary measures which are so much easier and not awkward at all…hand me that
13/32 wrench, not that’s an 11/64, yeah, there you go! The metric system was introduced by the First Republic in Revolutionary France, to replace the thousands of traditional measures existing all over the country, so that when you bought liquid or bulk goods, you could be sure that you got the same amount, whether in Paris or Lyons or anywhere else. The zealots not only wanted to get rid of the paralyzing complexity of the older customary measaures, they also wanted to establish new ones that were based some natural standard, one that everybody could understand. So the meter is one forty-millionth of the earth’s circumference. Once you have established a standard like the meter and the kilogram, you isolate a copy of it in a vault someplace where nobody can mess with it, and compare all other copies to it. Simple. Well, no, it’s really not. The reigning assumption about the reference copies was that they wouldn’t change, much or even at all, if kept tucked away. And exactly that seems to be the problem, or at least one of the problems. Scientists have demanded, and obtained, ever more precise ways of determining the value of the constants they use in their work. But, we still use the reference copies of the meter and the kilo, both kept in secure locations in Paris, to check how well the other national copies of the standards, well, I guess “measure up”. And this is where things get weird. It seems that either the refrence copy of the kilogram, called le grand kilo or some of the globally distributed copies, or some of them or all of them are gaining/losing mass. Nobody has a really good explanation for this, but one of the outcomes of efforts to solve the mystery has been a resurgence in efforts to find a natural reference so that everybody can know exactly what a meter and a kilogram really “are”. All this is detailed in a very interesting article appearing in the Los Angeles Times and called The International Kilogram Conundrum. The piece describes some efforts to create a better measure of the kilogram, which might not be so susceptible to variations, but I think the bigger story concerns why is this “mass drift” happening at all?
I have an LA Times link, but I don’t think all our readers can use it, so I recommend that you read the story on 3 Quarks Daily.
Kilo

It’s been a while since we peeked over the shoulders of the Lab Lit folks, and it’s about time we brought you up to date on what they’re doing. One of the things they are up to is building The List… not the Little List in The Mikado but an enumeration with brief notes of novels and plays and movies and such that deal with science and scientists, but not SciFi stuff, and not productions that descend into caricature, and the writer has to get the science right. So on those counts alone the bar is set pretty high. I was led to The List by a note on Lab Lit about a nomination, apparently made in perfect seriousness, of the Patrick O’Brien sea stories about life on a Royal Navy warship during the Napoleonic Wars. The science part emerges in the character of Stephen Maturin, the surgeon aboard HMS Surprise, the ship of war commanded by his friend and characterological opposite, Jack Aubrey. The person nominating the O’Brien novels, a professor of physics at a Uni in the UK, makes a very strong case for Maturin as a kind of scientist in the way that was understood at the time in question, and marshalls evidence from the books to show the doctor as an avid naturalist, busily investigating plant and animal forms in whatever part of the world Admiralty orders send Surprise. Maturin gathers specimens, dissects, classifies, keeps detailed note and forwards his contributions to learned societies, and just does all the scientisty stuff you would expect. Naval fiction is not everybody’s thing, and the O’Brien books make special demands on the reader in that their author was at great pains to get all the details of ships, shipboard life and battle at sea in the age of fighting sail exactly right. So there’s plenty of talk about mainsils and capstans and cutlasses and all the rest of it. The editors at Lab Lit seemed impressed at this elucidation of Dr. Maturin’s other self as scientist, and the O’Brien books may be allowed onto The List. You can read the nominating essay at:
Maturin
You can also look at the rest of The List and mutter to yourself about what’s there:
List