5/29/03:
On the International Reference Kilogram - a platinum cylinder in Germany which all the world's weights are calibrated by (and why it is becoming ever-so slightly lighter)
The final recommendation will be made by the International Committee on Weights and Measures, a body created by international treaty in 1875. The agency guards the international reference kilogram and keeps it in a heavily guarded safe in a ch?teau outside Paris. It is visited once a year, under heavy security, by the only three people to have keys to the safe. The weight change has been noted on the occasions it has been removed for measurement. "It's part ceremony and part obligation," Dr. Richard Davis, head of the mass section at the research arm of the international committee.
"You'd have to amend the treaty if you didn't do it this way."
Strange that a final scientific holdover from the height of 19th-century secular positivism should be guarded in such an oddly religious way.
[via aberrantNews.]
posted by jeremy @ 9:01 PM
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