James Vincent
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
The big thing that they changed is that the kilogram used to be based on a physical standard. So there was such a thing as the kilogram. It was created along with the meter and the other units of the metric system during the French Revolution.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And that eventually became what is officially known as the Système International or the SI, which has a lot of more units in it, but it's basically the metric system. And these units used to be based on physical standards. There was a kilogram, there was a meter. So everything, every unit in the world, every kilogram in the world was, technically speaking, a copy of this physical kilogram.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And it was a small little weight made of platinum iridium alloy, about the size of a hen's egg, very small because the metal is so dense because it's meant to be unchanging over time.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
and they kept it in a vault underground vault near Paris in Versailles and they had two of them over the centuries and then in sort of the middle of the 20th century they discovered that the most recent one which is known as the international prototype kilogram was losing weight and it wasn't losing much weight it was losing about 50 micrograms which is about the weight of a single eyelash
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
But in the sort of the high precision world of scientific metrology, the science of measurement, it's pretty consequential. So what they did is that they redefined the unit. So it's no longer based on a physical object, but it's based on universal constants, in this case, quantum constants. So these are sort of calculations or figures that we think are unchanging throughout reality.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So, for example, the meter used to be based, as the kilogram was, on a physical standard. And eventually they found that this was too imprecise. So they moved it to this sort of definition based on the distance traveled by light. So it's essentially it's tied to the speed of light.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So this is sort of the big project of the System International, of the metric system, is that over the centuries, they started off as physical standards, and they've all become these standards based on universal physical constants. And the idea is that by doing that, the units become unchanging.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So they're based on the speed of light, they're based on the spin of atoms, they're based on things that we think are the same throughout the universe.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
Well, each unit tends to have its own origin story. And some of them are like the metric system. We can say exactly how that came about because there's modern records of it. For things like the qubit, well, we just know someone decided to base that on qubits. the length of their forearm.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
For the inch, for example, we know that that was a sort of common unit used throughout Europe and was usually taken to be the width of the thumb. And now that sounds like a short inch, but if you take the width of your thumb and you press it down flat on a surface and measure the exterior across the widest part of the knuckle, that will be an inch. And we had actually...
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
There's a very interesting bit of law from King David of Scotland, which I think of about the 13th century, where he says that if you want to define an inch, you need to take the thumbs of three men, one small, one medium, and one large. And then you take the measurements of all their thumbs, and then you add them up, and you divide it by three. And that gives you the average length of the thumb.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So people were aware that there was variation within body parts, and they tried to mitigate this in various ways. Some units have really, really ancient origin stories. For example, the carrot as a unit of sort of gems, of precious gems that actually comes from the carob seed, which is a seed of a tree
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
which is sort of spread across Arabia and was used by Arabian traders in order to measure in their scales the weight of precious metals and gems. Because the seed was so consistent in size, it was the same each time it was created. That meant that it could be a useful marker. So yeah, some units we have stories for, some units it's not so clear. They change over time.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
Each unit is sort of like its own narrative history that often goes back thousands of years.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
Well, to measure the speed of light, this is the, so I mentioned earlier that the meter is, the length of the meter is defined using the speed of light and it's the distance traveled by light over a certain time period. And you go, okay, well, how do you measure the time? And we measure the time because the second is based on the number of frequency changes of a certain atom, cesium-133.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And it sort of flips back and forth between these two levels of frequency, essentially. It's like it's flipping. It's like it's turning around, essentially. And we count the number of rotations that it makes in order to define the second. So there is something sort of that can be counted at the end of all that.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
In terms of how we measure the speed of light, though, it's an interesting one because there's always the chance that we're going to measure it with greater accuracy. And what we do have for the speed of light, we have an agreed upon speed that we think this is as accurate as we're ever going to get. But there could always be more decimal places further down the line.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
The reason why the US never went metric, there's lots of explanations for it. One of the ones is that when the metric system was being defined, it was during the French Revolution, as I mentioned earlier, and the meter, which was the key unit of the metric system, was defined as one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. So that's the meridian line.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And you have to pick a specific meridian because the surface of the Earth is not a uniform shape. So that distance differs depending on whereabouts on the Earth you take it. The French, very understandably, decided to pick the Paris meridian. That is the meridian that runs through the center of Paris. The Americans and the British both thought this was a little too localized.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
They thought that it meant that the metric system was inherently foreign. And so that was something that made people reject it. At the time that the metric system was being made, there was a lot of support for the metric system in America. A lot of people from Washington to Jefferson all said, you know, we're pro metric. We think it's a great system. It has all sorts of advantages.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It's going to unite the world in this frictionless world of trade. We should get onto it. And, you know, quite understandably as well, you guys, you had pretty important things to get on with at that period. You know, you were you were creating a country from scratch. So understandably, measurement was not necessarily the highest thing on the agenda.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It becomes a really, really difficult thing to change a country's system of measurements because it is changing people's way of life in a way. There's lots of sort of fantastic discussions from this during the 19th century where it's sort of compared to changing people's language or going into their homes and moving things about in their house without their say so.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
You know, it's seen as very intrusive and it becomes a cultural issue as well. The real reason, though, if we want to get down to the sort of pragmatist approach to this, the real reason that the US and the UK as well, to a degree, didn't immediately adopt the metric system is that these were two countries that were too powerful that they ever needed to. The US has this huge internal market.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It had a huge manufacturing base. The UK had the same thing with the British Empire while it had the empire. And that meant that they had these huge markets that they could trade with him. And so they were just too powerful and too rich.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
The really interesting thing with when you look at the history of metric adoption is that it often happens right after a political revolution, which which sounds sort of sounds like a silly comparison. But it happens in Russia, for example, after the communist revolution, they go metric. It happens in China with communist revolution. Again, they go metric.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It happens in India when they free themselves from British imperial rule, they go metric. And it happens in South America a lot too, where you have new republics being created. One of the things they do is they adopt the metric system.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And my personal read on this is that it's only in these times of huge instability where the norms of the world, the norms of how we live our life are sort of thrown up in the air. They're thrown to hazard and we don't know where they're going to land. It's only in those moments that you can make such a monumental change.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
Yeah. I mean, the metric system, I would argue, is one of our species' sort of greatest scientific accomplishments in a way. I mean, I know that perhaps sounds like I'm overstating it, but it's such a useful tool. And it has been so thoroughly adopted throughout the world. And the benefits of it have been amazing. Imagine if every country today in the 21st century had
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
still used its own system of units and every time you went from one country to another you had to find out what the new units were or every time you shared you know plans to build a car or the latest scientific research you had to convert for each country that you went to what their units were. I mean imagine all the mistakes and the wasted time that would entail.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
When the metric system was having a sort of a real surge in the 19th century, people compared it to the introduction of a single language for the world. There was this big internationalist movement where they thought if the world shared all these systems, that there would be less fighting, that there would be more international cooperation. collaboration and harmony.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And advocates used to say, first, we'll get the shared units of weight and measure, then we'll get a shared money system, and then we'll get a shared language. And once we're all speaking the same language, you know, there'll be peace on earth. And obviously, it's a pretty rose-tinted view of the world.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
We have very good translation tools now that make it easy to translate from one language to another. I don't think it particularly stops wars, but there is something in there in that if you're all speaking the same language, whether that language is speech and grammar or whether it is weights and lengths, that that does help reduce friction. So I have quite an idealist view of the metric system.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So it was... It was originally one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. The motivation for that is that they wanted a unit that was going to be defined by something unchanging and something that was accessible to everyone.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So they thought if we measure the Earth, that is sort of humanity's shared heritage, that anyone would then therefore be able to recreate this measurement by taking measurements of the Earth again in the future. And so you said that there is a physical meter. You mean like there's a stick? There was. There was. Yeah. So they came up with this. They made this measurement.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
They took these measurements by traveling across Europe, a pair of astronomers, and they came up with this measurement, one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. And then they realized, okay, great, we've got this, but how is everyone else going to copy this? So they turned it into a physical meter standard.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And the first meter and the first kilogram, which are known as the meter and kilogram in the archives, were unveiled in 1799. And so for a while, every meter was a copy of that meter stick. And is that meter stick still around? No. It is. I've seen it. I've seen it. It is in the National Archives in Paris, in the Hôtel de Subban, if my memory is correct. Yeah, it's still there.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It's a beautiful thing. It's kept in this iron vault in the center of the archive.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So they decided when they were making the metric system that they wanted all the units to be interconnected. So once they had the meter, they then turned that into a cube, which is a decimeter on each side. That's a tenth of a meter. And then... That would be the capacity measure, that cube. And then they filled that with water and then they made the weight of that water the kilogram.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So that's where the kilogram comes from. And then you divide that into thousands to get your grams. But again, this is something that, okay, so that sounds like it's really easy to work out. You make the cube, you fill it with water, you weigh it, that's your kilogram.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
But when you look into the sort of very high precision measurements, you realize, OK, well, what type of water are you going to use? You know, saltwater has a slightly different weight to freshwater. And where are you going to measure this?
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
Because if you measure it at the top of a mountain, it's going to have a slightly different weight to if you measure it at the bottom, because the effect of gravity will be different on the mass. So, again, they decided that rather than have this sort of definition of, Um, they would instead create a physical standard and these were created at the same time.
Something You Should Know
The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And again, copies were made and shared around the world.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
In France, there was a huge campaign and they saw it, as I say, as this sort of political campaign that they were freeing people from the old system of measurement. And the big thing was that in France at the time, units of measurement really divulged. They were different in different towns because the authority to define them was often kept by sort of local aristocratic nobility.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And they would make tweaks to it based on what they liked. And this meant that you could have a pint in one town that would be a litre or, you know, half a litre, whatever it was. And then you'd go 80 miles down the road to another town and it would have a different definition. Obviously, this was incredibly confusing. It hurt trade.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It was, you know, it made life difficult for people all across the country. So the metric system was really embraced to begin with. There was a campaign to sort of educate people about it, but people were really keen on it. They wanted change. They wanted standardization. Unfortunately, this was happening during one of the most tumultuous periods in French history.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And the French revolutionaries decided that they didn't just want to remake weights and measures. They wanted to remake other things. So for example, they got rid of the old calendar, and they created a French Republican calendar, which each month had 30 days in it. And instead of a seven-day week, you had a 10-day week. And there were three weeks in each month.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And then they even went so far as to decimalize time. So they got rid of the 24 hour clock and they introduced a 10 hour clock where each hour has 100 minutes in it and each minute has 100 seconds in it. So they were really very ambitious about changing the world and making it more rational. But of course, there was so much change that people got sick of it.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And when Napoleon took power in his coup, he got rid of most of the metric system because he thought it was just too much. He said it was tormenting the people with trivia. He thought they couldn't handle it.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So the mile was an ancient Roman unit of measurement that originally was milus passus, which meant a thousand paces. And, you know, that's it. That's it in the title, essentially, that they they had a unit which was a pace and they thought you measure out a thousand of them and it becomes a mile. Obviously, that's, you know, depending on your length of a stride, it's not really quite a mile.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
But what often happens in the history of measurement is that even if you're the value may fluctuate. Sometimes the unit name stays the same because it's one that people are used to, and it just gets standardized in different ways over time.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
So there is a Finnish unit of length that was known as the peninkuma, and that was the distance at which a dog's bark could be heard. And there's one used by the Sami people, which is the poronkusima, which is the distance a reindeer can walk before it needs to urinate. So these are units of length that you might think, oh, well, how would you ever know that? How would you ever standardize that?
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
And it is pretty tricky. But if you're, say, part of the Sami people and you're hanging out with the reindeer all the day and you're traveling with them, it probably would be a decent rule of thumb to be like, yep, we've gone three reindeer toilet breaks, so we must be just about there.
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The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
It was originally 1 ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. The motivation for that, they wanted a unit that was going to be defined by something unchanging and something that was accessible to everyone.