Radiolab - Less Than Kilogram

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

In today’s story, which originally aired in 2014, we meet a very special cylinder. It's the gold standard (or, in this case, the platinum-iridium standard) for measuring mass. For decades it's been coddled and cared for and treated like a tiny king. But, as we learn from writer Andrew Marantz, things change—even things that were specifically designed to stay the same.Special thanks to Ken Alder, Ari Adland, Eric Perlmutter, Terry Quinn and Richard Davis.And to the musical group, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, for the use of their song “Horses and Hounds.”We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Vote on your favorites soon, check here for details: https://radiolab.org/moonSign-up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, it's Latif. This is Radiolab. I'm thinking today in the aftermath of American Thanksgiving about all the people who got together with their families, sat down for a nice little meal, and then, oh, God, politics came up somehow and they found there was just something they couldn't agree on. And you can't even reckon, like how does this other person not even understand the basic facts of the situation?

And so if you're leaving this holiday feeling like you need something concrete, something apolitical, something objective in this moment, this episode is for you. It's an episode we originally broadcast in 2014 about a project to make something everlasting, something that everyone, everywhere could agree to follow. And we actually have kind of a dramatic update at the end, so stay tuned for that. Here you are, less than kilogram. Wait, you're listening. Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. Yup. Rewind.

Hey, I'm Jad Iboomron. I'm Robert Krollwitz. This is Radiolab, the podcast. And this, I actually brought a list. Okay, why don't you share with me your list. Where is this thing? This is Andrew Marantz. He's a writer and editor at the New Yorker Magazine.

Oh, I might have gotten lost. Who occasionally pops onto our show. Maybe you were mugged by a... Ah, here it is. And he recently got obsessed with a list of measurements. Base units, they're called. They're SI base units, the System International. So let me do it this way.

Have you ever wondered how long an inch is? Exactly how long? I know, I just look at a ruler. Well, but how do you know that your ruler and my ruler do have the same amount of inch space or that someone in China, that their inch is our inch as your inch is my inch? I haven't really thought about it,

but I just assume that there's like a master inch somewhere? Bien sûr. I say it in French for a reason, which you'll feel in a moment. That is what was on this list that Andrew was looking at. It's a list of standard measures for everything we have around how big something is, how far something is, how hot something is.

It's all on this list. Okay, so when you go down the list of the Système International des Units, Here's what you get. A meter is a fraction of a second of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum. Okay. What? A second is how much radiation corresponds to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.

That's the definition of a second? How many times does a particular atom jiggle? Yeah. Wow. Uh, an ampere, which measures electric current... You know, an amp. ...is a constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10⁻⁷ newtons per meter of length.

I have no idea what that means. See that's the thing if you look at the actual definitions of any of these things, amp, meter, second, whatever, you go... But there is one standard on the list that is unique for its simplicity. The definition of the standard unit of measurement that is a kilogram is... No math, no numbers. It is a... thing. A particular thing?

A plum-sized... thing. It is the only thing we use to measure things. It's the last one standing. The only physical standard left. Why is it the last... and why would there... is it... what? Wait wait what? Let me just take you back to the beginning of the story. Like I must admit that I I expected this story to be a lot more boring than I found. It's like an epic story. That is Latif Nasser, science historian, regular on our show and he says if you go all the way back to the very first farmers back in Mesopotamia. All of the earliest measurements were super intuitive.

And he says a lot of them came from the body. As in that bunny is coming close to the net. How close dad? Two hands, but it's not just like, because we think of like hands and feet, but it was also there. So many other kinds of measurements, like you would say, oh, something is as far as, you know, my voice can, oh, something is as far as my voice can carry.

Something is as far as I can see sitting on the top of a camel. Or something is as far as I can throw a stone. So that would mean like say, okay, I'm going to build a farm here and I'm going to do it three thrower rocks across. Yeah, yeah. The way I read about it was like travelers. Like if you're a Saharan traveler, you know, and you're, you need to know where the next

watering hole is, that's kind of a life and death measurement. They would say it's, you know, three thrower rocks away or it's 10 thrower rocks away. But, but you know, that there might be some built in uncertainty there because if you ask Achilles, it could be two throw rocks away, but if you ask me, it would be like 78. You have nailed exactly the problem with the throw rock system. And these problems kind of came to a head in the 1700s. It's the eve of the French Revolution. In a little town called Paris.

It's a pretty cosmopolitan place, which means that people are coming from different places and they all have their own measures. Approximately 250,000 different units of measurement in regular use. 250,000. Every commodity has its own measure, so you have grain, wine, oil, salt, hay, coal, wood, fabric, everything, and it's extraordinarily confusing. Not to mention it's extraordinarily bad for trade. So if I came to you and I said, Monsieur, I have a bit of cloth.

You would say, how much cloth you got? And I'd say, I have two yards. And you'd say, what's a yard? I'd say, it's this much. And the other guy would say, no, no, it's this much. And I'd say, no, no, it's this much. And he'd go, no, no, it's this much. And he was like, no, no, it's this much. And you could see that it was frustrating. And make it matters worse. In the 1780s, there was a famine. So there was a shortage of grain and people were hungry

and people were angry, which I am going call, that they were hangry. They were hangry. They were very hangry. So the bakers at the time, they knew that if they raised the price of bread, like an angry mob would basically come and kill them. But they also knew that with no absolute standard, there was no way to be sure that what you were getting

is what you were getting. And so what they started doing was they started just lightening their bread loaves by just a little. So as the famine got worse, people would be waiting in longer and longer lines to pay the same amount of money for smaller and smaller loaves. So they were getting hangrier and hangrier. And so one of the things that people are like crying out for is that they want standardized weights and measures. If I go to the bakery and I buy a loaf of bread, I want a whole loaf of bread. Don't short me on this. This is serious. Well you know what happens next.

The Bastille is stormed and the king is under house arrest and then under the guillotine. And as soon as the revolutionary government takes over, they say, all right. Okay, this is one of our first priorities. We are going to make a new standard. But not based on something arbitrary like a king. This is the enlightenment. Why don't we draw on some kind of totally different authority? The authority of nature. Of nature. Of nature.

The authority of nature. Of nature. Of nature. So, long story short, they took the circumference of the Earth. They took a quarter of that circumference, divided that by 10 million, and they got the meter. The meter they then divided by 10, cubed it, filled the cube with water, took the mass of the water, minted a cylinder of metal with that mass, and voila! They created the world's first kilogram. The idea of this was, if we make this thing that is so beautiful and perfect,

and everybody can see it that way, then not only will France use it, but the whole world will use it. Then goods and ideas can be exchanged everywhere by all people, and it will be beautiful and glorious. Liberté, fraternité, égalité. Exactly. They wanted something that would be eternal and unchanging for everybody for all time. So now I guess you want to see it, no? Yeah.

Okay. Okay, so it's in here. We ended up visiting the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. And this is where we'll be going in, but we're going to go into this. This guy, Patrick Abbott, physicist, was our guide. They took us three stories down into the bedrock of the state of Maryland, because they want things down here to be totally still. We've just gone through one double door.

Here comes another double door. Then we stepped into this vault of the room, and there it was. What we're looking at then is a glass jar with a little handle on top, and then inside that is another glass jar with a little handle on top, and inside that is... Is the thing. The thing. It's kind of gorgeous, really.

The shiniest little cylinder you've ever seen. Very small, and it looks very clean. Doesn't it, too? Yeah, it's almost hard to tell where the, like, Russian doll glass jar stops because it's so reflective. This might be a crazy question, but can we hold a kilogram? That's our producer, Lumevy. No. I'm just curious to know what it feels like.

We've been talking about it so much. They are very careful with the kilogram. And this isn't even really the real one. The original of the original of the original of the original. Le gong ca, as they call it. Lives in a basement in France. You can't get anywhere near that one. I could. No, you couldn't. I could can't get anywhere near that one. I could.

No, you couldn't. I could get all Tom Cruise on that. You die trying. Here's how it works. The international prototype is Big Gahoon. Now, that's the one used to calibrate six identical platinum cylinders. What they call witnesses or tamois in French. Those witnesses are then used to calibrate another set of cylinders, which are then used to calibrate another set of cylinders which are then used to calibrate the US standards Which is what we saw and that one is used to calibrate all kinds of things the weight of your lemons the scale in your bathroom green team you lost 34 pounds every time somebody loses a pound on that TV show biggest loser You can actually trace that like a bloodline if you will or an unbroken chain back to the

international prototype kilogram to a single object in a basement in France, the holy of holies that is the kilogram. But you're telling me that when something is weighed in the world often it goes all the way back to this one hunk of metal? That's what I'm saying. Which is why the next part of the story is so disconcerting. What happened in 1989. Is that according to Andrew,

the folks who take care of the official kilogram. The big K. They took it out of its jars. They put it in a steam bath. Hit it with the steam that rinses everything. Wait for it to dry. Then. They commence a ceremonial weighing.

Right. Well, how do you weigh the thing that is the standard of weight? Well, you weigh it against the copies. Like the US copy, for example. So they get one of those and they put it on one side of the scale and they put the grand K on the other.

And the IPK, the grand K, the one is light. Ah! What? It's light. It doesn't. It. How many, how many, how much lighter is it than its sisters? Roughly the mass of a grain of sugar.

Yeah. So. Is that gigantic? It's measurable. Wait, how do they know that it was light and not that the other ones were heavier? Right. Well, they didn't.

So they used the second sister copy. Still light. And the third sister copy. Still light. And the fourth and fifth and sixth. In comes the man from Germany. Light. In comes the man from Canada.

Light. In comes the man from Spain. Light. Which led them to the troubling possibility that the international standard for weight was losing weight. Well, we think that we think the big guy's the problem.

As far as how it lost that weight, really no one knows. One possibility is it got cleaned too much and maybe some of it got scraped away. Although it's disputed whether cleaning it more would make it lose weight or gain weight.

The other theory is outgassing. Like maybe a little hydrogen is seeping out of the metal. And then there was one thing I read that said, foul play cannot be ruled out. Well, see, I was thinking maybe the Taliban. Well, it's clear as we may have a slightly trippy situation here. We've got a hunk of metal losing weight and yet

because it is the standard. It still weighs exactly a kilogram, right? If the definition of a kilogram is the mass of the international prototype kilogram, whatever happens when you put that thing on the scale, that's a kilogram. You can't do that. And then everything else in the world is wrong.

No, you can't do that. It's ridiculous. It's like that doesn't sit right. That's like something that like the North Korean government would do. Just be like, no more cash. Like that, we can't just go around capriciously doing stuff like that.

All right. So if the standard of weight is, as you're saying, losing weight, so how do you fix that? An answer to that question after the break. Hey, I'm Lettiv Nasser, you're listening to Radiolab. Before the break, we learned that the international standard for a kilogram, which is a tiny platinum cylinder, is ever so slowly losing weight.

A problem which our Emeritus host Robert Kralwicz and New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz went to Maryland to investigate. Well, I'm getting zero cell phone reception down here. That means we're really deep. When we were down in that underground room in Maryland, we met a guy who has some thoughts about this. Oh, there he is. Okay. His name's John Pratt.

I'm the leader of the Fundamental Electrical Measurements Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Hi, John. John walked us through even more high security doors, and then we walked into this. Oh my god. Amazing room.

It's big. It is big. About three stories tall. Yeah. And it's made of, it's like a silver room. It has a silver gray floor. It has silver shiny walls. And your hair is on the silvery side.

Very much so. You probably wouldn't be allowed in here if you were a redhead. No. No. I don't even know how to describe it. It looks like a wheel turned on its side with the thing itself Looked sort of just like a like a massive round metal

Cauldron or like a big metal pot But then there are all these weird little gizmos and parts and then all these coiled up wires and just a stunning machine But it's all just for the benefit of the one One measure one kilogram. Yep. Because inside that giant cauldron there is an extremely, extremely sensitive... Balance. An equal arm balance. Which is basically like a seesaw. Or a teeter-totter. And usually you would set that up so that you would literally put kid on one side of the teeter-totter, kid on the other side of the teeter totter.

Now you've been in a playground so you know how this goes, but what they've done here is on one side of the teeter totter they've got the kilogram, like the grand K, that's kid number one. On the other side, instead of another kilogram, where kid two... Will have a highly variable magnet. Now here's the thing, the magnet won't be touching that side of the scale, it'll be exerting a force, an invisible force on that side. It'll produce a force and we could use that to hold the balance still.

And the force it takes to hold up the balance, that of course is the same as the weight of the gonkha sitting on the other side. And if you can convert that force into a number that everybody agrees to? Voila! You have just redefined the kilogram. You have wrenched it from the world of things, and it's become attached to the fundamental forces of the universe. Yep. You've grasped the gist of it. You want to see that happen right now? I can show you this with our Lego version of the Watt Balance.

If I can fire it up. Lego? Lego one? Well, see, the big one was being tested or something, so they took us over to look at the little one. Okay, so we have... Have a little scale and everything. You can see, I just disturbed the balance and it's, you know, jiggling around a little. It's free-floating. Okay, so you're now going with your tweezers and you're plucking the itty-bitty. Yep two gram mass. He puts this tiny little

thimble thing on the bounce and now it's going to he says levitate. Now it's easy, it prompts me mass on. Mass on. Yeah I'm gonna put the mass on. He pushes a button. All right and... All right, and... Wait, but when do we see the levitation? That was it. I missed it. Do it again. It was floating? It is floating, sitting on the balance.

Okay. That's not floating. That is floating. Does it fall to earth? That's a different idea of levitation. No, the truth is that once I finally figured out what this guy was doing it was actually sort of cool. He had taken a little metal weight he put it on one side of the scale then on the other side of the scale it was just empty but yet the thing didn't tip over because the empty side actually had a magnetic force equivalent to the metal

holding it just perfectly still. So if they're able to do that, does that mean that the Grand K's reign is done? Not yet. No, because first of all, you have to get straight with a lot of math. mc squared equals h nu, work backwards. You've got to divide by e and then by m. Measure the B field. Woo! Let's go! And then you get your amperes and your watts and your Planck's constant. Classic little Bohr model of atoms and stuff. Anyway. It is actually way more complicated, this whole thing, than I frankly will ever understand. But here's where we are at.

You got all these different teams around the world. You got John's team in Maryland with his seesaw. You got another lab, actually a couple of them that have their seesaws. You got a third lab that's literally counting the atoms. They're all doing experiments, comparing numbers, trying to get the numbers to agree so that by whatever route everybody agrees on exactly what a kilogram is. Right now they're close, they're in agreement out to about six decimal places, and that's not good enough, they want the numbers to agree out to eight decimal places, but if

they can do that, then, and only then, will the grand K be no more. Yeah. Because instead of defining the kilogram as whatever is equal to the grand K, now you have a new definition. The new definition of the kilogram, the kilogram, is the SI unit of mass, its magnitude is set by fixing the numerical value of the Planck constant to be equal to exactly 6.626069 and we have X's because we haven't all agreed what the final... those are the missing decimal places times 10 to the minus 34 when is expressed in the unit for actions joule

seconds which is a meter squared kilogram per second. Phew. That'll be such a simpler definition. Oh yeah. No, you've... And what will happen to the Grand Quai when the new definition goes into effect? Well now, so this is the sad part. It looks like a church. We will see after the end. The church where the...

The Grand Quai may eventually end up in a place like this. That's a big deal. Where so many standards have gone to die. This is the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. So this is the beginning. Zoïl Fassot was our tour guide. Yeah, what is this? A litre.

He showed us the original litre. Or is it 0.8 litre? Wow, some early thermometers. There's one funny object here. One room, he showed us the original. I think it was the Parisian meter. So in Paris, this was the infallible, the absolute standard. From 1801, I think. It's in a wooden box with a velvet packing,

and it's got silk ribbons at either end and it's just a very beautiful looking silver rod. To imagine the thing, the grand thing being in this place, sort of like seeing the Pope in shorts or something. It makes me a little, a little uncomfortable. So, while we were over here singing the praises of this object, how beautiful it is to have something real you can hold in your hands, there's a group of people for whom the kilogram situation was unacceptable. something real you can hold in your hands. There's a group of people for whom the kilogram situation was unacceptable.

This is scandalous. For example, Bill Phillips here from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He's speaking to a big gathering of people who care about this stuff. If this were the real kilogram that I was holding in my hands, the fingerprints that have been put onto this kilogram would increase the mass.

But of course it can't increase the mass because this is by definition a kilogram. That means all of you would lose weight. For the people in this room, the fact that we in the 21st century are basing our most finely tuned measurements on a hunk of metal cast in 1889? Now that's a situation that is clearly intolerable. After years of work, researchers figured out that new definition they were looking for.

In 2018, representatives gathered together in France. Hello, on commence. And they voted to replace the physical kilogram with that abstract bit of math. South Africa? Yes. Alemang, Germany? Yes. Yes.

Saudi Arabia? Yes. Thank you. Argentina? The physical kilogram was relegated to the dustbin of history. Australia. Australia. Austria.

Belgium. Brazil. Brazil. Thank you. Bulgaria. Bulgaria. Special thanks to Ari Adland and Eric Earlmutter and also to Terry Quinn. We don't want to forget Richard Davis and Ken Alder, Bob Waters, Michael Baum, Michael Newman and finally thank you to our math angel, soprano, Melissa Hughes.

Very weird to sing my own name. Also big props to reporter Andrew Marantz, Latif Nasser and our producer Lynn Levy. Hello, I'm Natalia and I'm from New York City and here are the staff's credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lula Miller and Latif Nasser are our wonderful co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Beko Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascutieros, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwan,

Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Thanks for listening to Radiolab. Bye. Hi, my name is Michael Smith. I'm calling from Pennington, New Jersey. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.