Plowshares to the Planck Constant
In a seventeenth-century building in the town of Sèvres, just west of Paris, there sits a 1.5 inch diameter, 1.5 inch tall cylinder made from an alloy of ninety percent platinum and ten percent iridium.
It resides under three bell jars, like a shiny metal center to a transparent Russian nesting doll in a mysterious, rarely-opened vault.
Accessing this vault requires the use of multiple independently-held keys, just like launching a nuclear missile.
Le Grand K
The mass of this shining cylinder of precious metal, polished to a mirror finish, is one kilogram.
Let me rephrase that: More accurately, one kilogram is the mass of that little chunk of platinum-iridium. The latter defines the former.
Or at least it did.
Until 2019, this object was the International Prototype of the Kilogram, the IPK, or sometimes, “Le Grand K.” Its home, Pavillon de Breteuil, inaugurated by Louis XIV in 1672, is the headquarters of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
The IPK’s deviation from one kilogram was, by definition, precisely zero. For 130 years it was the kilogram, the last of the seven base units of the SI system to be defined by a physical artifact.
All Roads Lead to Sèvres
Today, the kilogram and the other six base units of the Système Internationale (meter, second, ampere, Kelvin, mole, and candela) are defined in terms of physical constants like the speed of light and, in the case of the kilogram, the Planck constant.
Throughout most of my career in medical device development and manufacturing, however, every measurement of mass I made was traceable to that one platinum-iridium cylinder sitting in its vault in Sèvres.
The scales and balances in all the engineering labs and on all the production lines were calibrated against a chain of ever-more-precise reference standards, all leading back to Le Grand K.
Although I didn’t know their history at the time, I even purchased platinum-iridium components from the company, Johnson Matthey, that made the IPK and its six sister copies in 1874.
Shoring Up the Foundation
The reference standards for units of measure, once represented by human-made physical artifacts, and now by the constants of physics, are foundational not just to medical devices, but to all of science.
Our current system of weights and measures represents the pinnacle of consistency and standardization, but that wasn’t always the case.
If you read last week’s newsletter, A Thousand Paces More, you learned that the mile is derived from the Latin mille passus, a thousand paces.
Far from the rigor of measurements anchored in unchanging constants of the universe, the mile, and most of our historic measurements, were defined by references as variable as the size of human body parts and the physical condition of Roman soldiers.
A Simple Number That Everyone Will Remember
We’ve come a long way, but the legacy of those less sophisticated times remains. Today’s mile is defined as 5,280 feet—”a simple number that everyone will remember,” as comedian Nate Bargatze perfectly deadpanned in a recent (and fantastic) Saturday Night Live skit (search "Washington's Dream" on YouTube).
Bargatze is certainly not the first to poke fun at our convoluted system of measurement. It’s weird.
At least the Romans had the good sense to standardize. Over twenty-five hundred years ago, Roman general and son-in-law of Caesar Augustus, Marcus Agrippa, officially proclaimed that one pace was exactly five feet (his own feet, to be specific), which yielded a 5,000 foot mile, a number that actually is simple and memorable.
Airtight Logic
So, how did we get here?
The logic of today’s 5,280 foot mile is quite simple, really.
- A mile is eight furlongs, and a furlong is ten chains (ten Gunter’s chains, that is).
- A chain has one hundred links, each 7.92 inches long, for a total of sixty-six feet.
- Thus a furlong is ten times sixty-six, or 660 feet.
- Multiply that by eight furlongs by 660 feet per furlong and you get the easily remembered 5,280 feet to a mile. Duh.
What was wrong with these people? Did they just like multiplication? It makes absolutely no sense!
Or does it?
Context Is Everything
Let me tell the story a little differently.
Once upon a time, most people in Europe were subsistence farmers. They had to invest a lot of mental energy worrying about their crops, because their lives literally depended on it.
They plowed their land with teams of oxen, and their very survival hinged on their ability to sew those crops at the right time. They had to know how much to plant, and how long it would take, so they made careful observations.
They knew how long a furrow their ox-teams could plow without a break because they stepped it off using the measuring devices conveniently attached to their ankles.
The average was about 660 feet—one furrow-long—a unit of measure at least 1800 years old.
The mile is even older.
Parallel Paths
Just as Marcus Agrippa saw the need to standardize paces in 29 BCE, British Parliament recognized the need to further standardize and reconcile their various, previously unrelated units of measure in 1593 under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
This wasn’t a new idea. The mandate to standardize measures is in the Magna Carta, written 378 years earlier. And we think the modern government moves slowly.
The furlong was deeply entrenched, but so was the mile, so they solved the problem as best they could with an Act declaring “a mile shall contain eight furlongs,” creating the 5,280 foot mile we still use today.
As for Mr. Gunter, a surveyor by trade, he did not perversely make his chain sixty-six feet long and then declare that a furlong was ten of them just to frustrate engineers 900 years later.
It went the other way around. He made a hundred-link chain that measured one tenth of the already-established furlong, allowing him not only to divide furlongs into one-link thousandths, but also to conveniently mark off another relevant unit.
A plot of land measuring 660 by 66 feet, or 43,560 square feet (another simple and easy to remember number) is one acre, historically the amount of land that those same oxen could plough in a full day.
An acre is ten Gunter’s chains long by one chain wide—how very metric of him.
Plowshares to Plank Constants
Without that history and context, none of this makes any sense to us.
Yet when we dig deeper, we find that our silly 5,280 foot mile resulted from the same logical, rational efforts toward consistency and standardization that led us to an ultra-precise platinum-iridium cylinder in a vault in France, and ultimately to today’s seven base SI units defined by seven universal physical constants.
A thousand paces, eight furlongs, and 5,280 feet to a mile makes no sense to us, but it made perfect sense to them.
And that’s the point.
Making Sense
If you want to truly understand a person’s behavior, you must first let go of your judgments about how backwards, primitive, irrational, and wrong they are and try to figure out how they are making sense of the world.
Chances are there is a logic to it, just not your logic. It might even be base ten logic!
Understanding how another person is making sense of the world doesn’t mean you agree, it just means you can see how they see it, and that’s a big step toward resolving conflict.
Here are ten ways you can better understand how all those unreasonable, vexing, and downright wrong-headed people around you are making sense of the world.
But be forewarned: you might learn that they are not as unreasonable and wrong as you thought:
- Listen Deeply: Listen not just to respond, but to understand. Pay attention to word choices, metaphors, and the stories people tell. We often reveal our meaning-making frameworks through the language we use and the narratives we construct.
- Ask Open-Ended Questions: Questions that begin with "how" or "why" tend to reveal someone's thought process. "What makes that important to you?" or "How did you come to that conclusion?" can be particularly illuminating.
- Suspend Judgment: What seems irrational often makes perfect sense in the other person’s context. Temporarily setting aside your own framework allows you to see the internal logic of theirs.
- Seek Context: Learn about that all-important context by asking about their experiences, background, and the constraints they operate under. People's behaviors make sense within their lived realities.
- Pay Attention to Values: People's actions often reflect their core values. Listen for what they prioritize and what trade-offs they're willing to make. Again, you don’t have to agree.
- Notice Emotions: Strong emotions often signal when something important is at stake. When someone shows emotion, it can point to core beliefs or values being affirmed or threatened.
- Imagine Different Perspectives: Actively try to imagine the world through their eyes. "If I had their experiences and faced their constraints, how might I see this situation?"
- Check Your Understanding: Reflect back what you've heard: "It sounds like you see this as..." This gives them the opportunity to confirm or clarify your understanding, which will always be imperfect.
- Be Patient: Understanding someone's worldview takes time and multiple conversations. Their perspective may unfold gradually as trust builds. A “gotcha” pointing out flaws in their logic will destroy that trust instantly.
- Let Go of Hidden Agendas: You must engage with genuine curiosity. It’s an exploration, not a debate. If your real agenda is to win or prove them wrong, don’t bother.
Why Bother?
In the case of our 5,280 foot mile, when we ask how the people who arrived at that simple, easily remembered number made sense of the world, we see that they were not unreasonable or illogical at all.
In fact, they were driven by the same belief in consistency and standardization that led to a cylinder of precious metal becoming the single point of reference for the entire world, including me.
Shared beliefs. Common values. That’s often what we find when we take time to understand the behavior of others. It's not always easy, but it’s worth the effort.
Of course, to understand another person’s sense-making, you first must understand your own. It’s a lifelong inquiry, and we’re here to help you get started.
Until next time,
Greg
