Quantifying the World

Have you ever wondered where systems of measurement come from?

Whether Metric or English, these systems are more or less taken for granted. For a long time, the thought of where these come from never occurred to me. Meters, feet, pounds, and kilograms all seemed quite simple and I never thought of where they came from. However, Dr. McCoy recently shared an article from Atlas Obscura that made me rethink this.

According to the article, France had initially used many arbitrary systems of measurement before the development of the meter. The article describes the development of this in the following passage:

To define the meter, French astronomers Delambre and Méchain measured 10 millionths of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator through a Paris meridian, which you can still find at the center of the Paris Observatory.”

It had never occurred to me that a group of people just decided upon the meter years ago. While, yes it was based on extensive scientific research, who is to say that metric measurements are perfect. Kayla pointed out to the rest of my group that the exact mass of the kilogram is changing. I decided to research this further and found an article from The Boston Globe, entitled The Kilogram is Changing. Weight, What? by John Leicester. The article points out that governments are gathering in Versailles to agree on new standards for the kilo.

It had never occurred to me that the kilogram or any metric unit of measurement could change. I’m fascinated by how kilograms, an essential unit of measurement utilized by people around the world is changeable. This realization forced me to understand that systems of measurement are flawed tools through which humanity can understand the world. They might be one of the best systems we have to quantify reality, but there are not many better options.

Now how does this tie into the works of Percival Everett? Well, Everett’s works are decidedly absurdist. Works like I am Not Sidney Poitier call attention to the absolute lunacy of the world and how preposterous humankind actually is. There’s something inherently strange about the meter being based off a few blocks of marble made in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the foot, a base measurement of the English system was based on the size of an actual person’s food. These systems are important and I am not going to deny their significance, but they are an indication of how impossible it is to truly understand the world. All humankind has are flawed tools that are fleeting and changeable as anything else.

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