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A plum-sized lump of metal takes us from the French Revolution to an underground bunker in Maryland as we try to weigh the way we weigh the world around us.
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- Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. - Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR. - Hey, I'm Jada Boomeran. - I'm Robert Krollich. - This is Radio Lab, the podcast. - And this. - I actually brought a list. - Okay, let's 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. - So occasionally pops onto our show. Maybe you were mugged by-- - Ah, here it is. - And he recently got obsessed with a, it's a list of measurements. - Base units, they're called. There's their SI base units, the system international, you know. - So let me do it this way. Have you ever wondered how long an inch is? I'm exactly how long it's been. - I know, I just look at a ruler. - Well, but how do you know that your ruler and my ruler do I have the same amount of inch space or that someone in China, that their inches, our inches, your inches, my inch? - I really thought about it, but I'm just assumed that there's like a master inch somewhere? - Me too. I say it in French for a reason and it would feel at the 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 system international de units. - Here's what you get. - A meter, 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 CZM-133 atom. - That's the definition of a second. - How many times does that particular atom jiggle? - Yeah, an ampere, which measures electric current.
Transcription truncated.
A plum-sized lump of metal takes us from the French Revolution to an underground bunker in Maryland as we try to weigh the way we weigh the world around us.