It has but a few more months left of its distinguished life. In November it will be declared no longer the world’s unit of mass. In May – providing there are no objections from the nations that make up the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) – it will be officially stood down. It will go the way of the thumb and the foot and the angelic wings. Instead the kilogram is to be determined – and one has to take a deep breath before launching into this monstrosity of a definition – “by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m2⋅s−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.” Whatever this may possibly signify.
There are reasons for all of this, of course. The demands of a world now so dominated by extreme precision are such that metres and kilograms and seconds and units of electricity and light intensity and so on have now to be measured and calibrated in concert, and measured to tolerances that were barely imaginable when the London metal smelters first cast their ingots of platinum, back in the stygian gloom of Victorian times.
I accept all these reasons for change as sensible and meet and proper and right. But in truth I do still feel a small pang of sympathy for the little platinum cylinder. It is a thing of great beauty, and once so lovingly made, yet is now to be tossed away, consigned to a glass case in some unvisited museum, unwanted and unloved for the rest of time. There is something truly pitiful about it, and all that its loss of status suggests. And so yes, I can imagine the feeling of unspeakable melancholy, deep in its little metal soul.
http://bit.ly/2xsJiQD
“Unvisited museum,” eh?
ReplyDeleteI am a man of melancholy, I have been told. Mawkish and maudlin at turns. Yet I see no reason to call this Truly Pitiful: for godsakes, those august men of science who gave us Le Grand K would be delighted to see a yet-more-accurate definition of the kilo.
ReplyDeleteThey did the best they could, those scientists, whilst the sun yet shone upon them. They are gone away and it's our turn now. As the old song said "The fundamental things apply / As time goes by". Les témoins , no, we are the witnesses.
I think you may have meant "unspeakable metal collie".
ReplyDeletesep.yimg.com
...as someone who has workedin a couple of museums, I can only imagine that this particular author just hasn’t been to one in a while. Attendance is up at all the big institutions, the numbers coming through the doors and the queues are phenomenal. As the US and UK governments take less responsibility for public education, museums are carrying more and more of that load.
ReplyDeleteDon’t worry about the lump of metal getting lonely, it’ll get more visitors than it’s ever had.
Do we know why Le Gran K has been losing mass?
ReplyDeleteLast I heard it was still a mystery.
Nelson Brown ( adjusts tin foil hat, looks about furtively ) [whispers] Entropy!
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