November 15, 2005--Measure Pour Measure

Last evening there was a lovely bon voyage dinner for friends who are about to leave for Paris where they plan to live for at least the next few years. They will be taking their five month old son, Jose, with them. You know what a worrier I am and I suspect you think I am fretting about how safe they and Baby Joe will be surrounded by the current “unrest.” Well, you would be wrong.

I promised just yesterday to stop blogging about The French and promise that this will not be about them. Rather it’s about how they will fare in the food markets.

I worry because when I have been in Paris for any extended period of time, and do any food shopping, I always wind up buying more cheese than I want and too little liver. It’s because I can’t ever seem to figure out how to convert grams into ounces or kilos into pounds. I know theirs is a more rational system, but what can I say, I am always confused.

So I was a little assured by what I read in a recent article in the NY Times about a vault in Paris that keeps safe a platinum and iridium cylinder about the size of a plum whose weight is exactly one kilogram. In fact, this platinum plum is the kilogram (see link below for full article). It has resided there for 116 years and has for all that time been the defining unit of mass for the entire world. It may be that in spite of French resistance, English has become the virtual universal language, but when it comes to weights and measures, it’s all French. Or it has been up until now.

Just when the French thought their cylinder would never be supplanted, some pesky scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland (in, what can I say, the United States) has been arguing in favor of doing just that--replacing that hunk of platinum with a new standard that is more cosmic and less subject to wear and tear—a sort of high-tech kilogram (thankfully, not a pound) that is based on “the universal constants of physics”—something that scientists anywhere in the world could use for calibration purposes in their own labs. Instead, I suppose, of checking out the French kilogram from its vault in Paris and taking it home with them.

You can understand the value of this idea--what would happen, for example, if someone, say, in Shanghai checked it out and lost it? Not a good situation at all. In fact, there is precedent for thinking about universalizing the standards of our standards. One of the world’s earliest measures, the cubit, was the distance from an Egyptian pharaoh’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger. Well and good. That makes great sense to me. But what happens when you need to figure out how many cubits a new tomb needs to be in, for example, Phoenicia. It isn’t very practical to check out the pharaoh’s arm.

The good Dr. Steiner back in Gaithersburg has now worked out a way to fix the mass of his kilogram to 99.999995 percent accuracy. That would work for me, but before he can get anyone to agree to his version of a kilo it appears he has to raise that last “5” to at least an “8.” Doesn’t sound like that much of a problem.

But back to that food shop in Paris and my worries. While tossing and turning last night, thinking about how my friends would be able to figure out how to get the right amount of saucisson in the market, I realized there was an easy solution—as soon as Doc Steiner refines his numbers, that old cylinder is history. Maybe then Noki and Alex can get their hands on it and take it with them when shopping. Baby Joe is a growing boy, and I want to be sure he gets the right amount of nutrition so he can grow to be big and strong and smart.