Does This Constant Make Me Look Fat?

Although everyday measurements here in the U.S. involve pounds, ounces and such, scientists and villains in drug-related television shows use the kilogram, an measure of solid weight adopted by many nations around the world.

The standard kilogram is an egg-shaped piece of metal in a vault in Paris, officially known as the International Prototype Kilogram but nicknamed "Le Grand K." That particular alloy consists of a blend of metals designed to slow erosion (and thus weight loss) and has been the standard kilogram since 1889. It was created to be exactly one thousand times the weight of a gram, which had been defined in 1795 as the absolute weight of one cubic centimeter of water, measured at the temperature of melting ice.

One of the problems, as noted above, is the reality that all matter "erodes" by losing atoms over time. Even the carefully protected confines of Le Grand K and its special construction have not stopped this. The weight loss makes little difference in everyday matters, but when it comes to the precision demanded by scientific experiments -- especially ones conducted by modern super-sensitive equipment -- a century of erosion can affect important measurements.

Another problem is the amount of variation possible in measuring the gram itself. Corralling a cubic centimeter of water may be easy, but do all cubic centimeters of water weigh the same? Can changes in air pressure affect the temperature at which the ice begins to melt? Can these and other factors create uncertainty in the measurements? The answer is yes, and when you realize that any gets magnified in the thousandfold expansion from gram to kilogram you see a whole lot more uncertainty creep in to the mix than scientists want.

Enter the Planck Constant, often designated by h by scientists. It's a figure used to measure action or energy on the quantum scale, deep down in the basic building blocks of the universe. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland have a machine that can measure Planck's constant, and over the course of the next couple of years, they will make several. So will other instruments around the world, and the value that crops up most often will be accepted as a value for the constant.

As the story at the Review of Scientific Instruments notes, h is a measurement of energy. The determined value will be fed into Albert Einstein's famous E=mc² equation because it describes the relationship between energy and mass. When the equation has a number for E (energy) and a number for c (the speed of light) then almost anyone can solve it and find out what m (mass) is. Give me a calculator and even I can do it.

That value for mass will be used to determine the mass of the gram and all of the weights depending on it, such as a kilogram. Which means Le Grand K will become Le Grand Has-Been, although the scientists doing the research figure it'll still be kept around for history's sake.

You may think I miss the point, but one of the most fascinating aspects of this process to me is that there is an actual journal called Review of Scientific Instruments devoted to articles and papers about things scientists use to measure other things, and it's been around since 1930. That's a lot of test-tube articles.

That's All Right, Scotty

Many musical historians downgrade Elvis Presley's icon status because he rocketed to fame covering other people's music. Today, his practice of rerecording music from African-American performers and selling it to the prejudiced audiences of the 1950s would probably earn him condemnation for "whitewashing."

But just as there would have been no Elvis without early blues musicians like Robert Johnson and rock-n-roll pioneers like Chuck Berry, the modern rock music scene would look nothing like it does today without Elvis.

And without Scotty Moore, the guitar wizard whose skill and dynamic playing gave Elvis the musical fuel for his vocals and wild charismatic performances, it's hard to imagine rock guitar playing looking anything like it does today either.

Tuesday, Scotty packed up his Gibson and headed off to jam with his former bandmates, passing away at 84.

Waiting for Humpty Dumpty

In modern politics, conservative people are usually accused of wanting to turn the historical clock back to some mythical time period when things were good for them or people like them. Conservative writer Yuval Levin, in his book The Fractured Republic, says there's some truth to the accusation. But rather than the 1950s or the 19th century or the dark ages as per some of the stupider and more shameful claims, Levin says the real time frame that a lot of conservative folks would like to reinstate is 1981.

And, he adds, more progressive people have their own nostalgia disorder, eyeing with fondness the mid-1960s as a time when the programs they favor began to take effect and make things better for many people -- before the eeeevil Richard Nixon took office and blew it all up. Levin admits his conservative viewpoint sees a lot more value in 1981 and a lot of wishful thinking in 1965. But he says that both groups are falling victim to a glaring mistaken assumption that makes what they want impossible. The right standard-bearer can't follow in Ronald Reagan's footsteps and supercharge our national economy like we saw in the 1980s. And the right mix of programs, policies and technocratic solutions won't lift poor people out of poverty, right historic wrongs and make the country the welfare state paradise so many people believe Norway to be.

The reason, Levin says, is that the middle of the 20th century saw a mix of technological advances and external challenges that brought a unity to American society that no longer exists and probably can't be recaptured. That time period shaped a generation whose members on both right and left wings look to it as an ideal to which the right person or policies could bring us. But the truth is that our society was in a fantastically balanced place between consolidation and decentralization that allowed us the best of both worlds; a sweet spot that is unlikely ever to happen again. The consolidation provided an economic engine that made things good for many people, even while it overlooked many others. The beginning decentralization crossed sociological boundaries to allow people more freedom and space to determine their own identities while removing the rationale for respecting any of society's older boundaries and customs that slowed self-discovery.

Nostalgia blinds both groups, Levin says. And when they fail to see that the circumstances of the 2010s are unlike 1965 or 1981, they aim for solutions that won't work today whether they worked in the preferred eras or not. Levin's own solutions try to recognize the needs seen by the architects of the 1960s Great Society as well as the failure of the federal government to be able to meet those needs -- something frequently pointed out by the crew running things in the 1980s.

He puts great store in the idea of "subsidiarity," a concept that basically says a need should be met by the most local level of government possible. City councils can't do much about hostile foreign powers, so we have a national defense headed up by nationally elected leaders. Sometimes those leaders aren't any better at international relations than the Ward 5 alderman, but that's their fault and the people who voted for them, not the fault of the concept. A federal fire department, on the other hand, with some kind of central dispatching station that responded to every call in the entire nation, would be ridiculous and lead to a lot of burned buildings and unrescued cats in trees.

Levin admits that subsidiarity is a conservative position and that his own philosophy as much as considered judgment leads him to favor it. He doesn't think he's wrong, but he knows it's possible. And subsidiarity as a concept has its own wrinkles that might need some working out. First of all, the more or less atomized society in which we now live needs to rediscover the idea of communities based on something more than "Everyone leaves everyone alone to do what they want and looks out for themselves first and foremost." But modern politics can't even seem to consider new ideas about how to handle today's problems in today's world. It fails because neither side will realize that, quite aside from the vitriol, childishness and arrogance their discourse displays, what they're really arguing about is what date the flux capacitor should show.

And time travel's not real.

The More Things Change...

The fun blog Ask the Past offers some advice from bygone days on how to best survive and enjoy the summer.

And it seems one of the problems facing us today in the hot season is the same as one faced by the folks who took advice from The Shepheards Kalendar in 1656: "for in this time is nothing grievouser than chafing." Anyone who has suffered from the particular summertime version of this problem would definitely agree that there are few things grievouser.

A Century of Deduction

Dating from the days of silent films, Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson have been onscreen in different forms since 1916. Over at Neatorama, you can view a video that gives brief glimpses of all the ways that the pair have been shown, from regular movies to cartoons to TV shows to re-imagined versions in other times and settings.

It's interesting, and it's also fun to try to see how many of the different versions of the character you can identify. For me, of course, one of the most obvious features of the video is the complete and utter superiority of Jeremy Brett in the role of Holmes in the Granada Television productions made between 1984 and 1994. The distinction is not at all difficult to make.

It is, in fact, elementary.

Future Face

The internet has everything, so it now has a blog devoted to deep exploration of the typefaces used in famous science-fiction movies. Some of them were designed with the futuristic look of their world in mind, and some of them were just regular fonts used most probably because they were public domain and free.

I haven't read all the way into the blog yet, but at least it seems so far like no one in the future uses Papyrus. So maybe there's hope for us yet.

Well, How Did We Get Here?

On certain levels, this is a simple question to answer: Our mommies and our daddies liked each other very much, and they shared a special kind of hug, and then a few months later, along we came! Simple, but as my friends who've explained this matter to their children have told me, not necessarily easy.

But if you spool back a ways, you can get to a place where that's a question without a good answer yet. The elements that make up our bodies are what's left over from the explosions of the first stars. The first stars condensed out of the primordial galactic particle soup that came from the big bang. Where that came from, we don't really know, but that's not the mystery of why we're around.

Every subatomic particle has an "anti-particle" that is like it in every detail except for having the opposite electrical charge and a goatee. One of those may not be true.

Of course, the designations of "particle" and "anti-particle" are arbitrary, just like the ideas of "positive" and "negative" charges. The key is that they're opposites of each other, and whenever they encounter each other they annihilate in a burst of energy. This is why there aren't anti-particle people walking around exploding when they touch their counterparts.

Which leads us to our mystery. Since there's no preference in particle creation, the big bang should have made exactly the same amount of matter and antimatter. They should have subsequently wiped each other out and left an empty universe. Our presence seems to suggest this did not happen, so we know the amount of matter in the early universe exceeded the amount of antimatter.

What we don't know, and what a lot of physicists and cosmologists are engaged in trying to find out, is why it did, because it shouldn't have. Scientists are the people who respond to the suggestion about not looking a gift horse in the mouth with a "why wouldn't you?" The researchers in the story at the link are following clues suggested by particles called "beauty quark" and "heavy neutrino."

Expect some silly undergraduate to start complaining about these labels promoting "lookism" at some point in the future, when we will wish for some anti-particles to appear and annihilate them. But in order to be true anti-particles to people this dumb, they will be way too smart to be tricked into that. On the other hand, they'll probably also be smart enough to figure out the answer to the imbalance.