Smoots and garns
How much beauty does it take to launch a ship? How
much does a male physicist’s beard grow in a second?
And what is the optimal length of a lecture? These
may not seem like typical phenomena you need to
measure, but they’ve nonetheless inspired creative
souls to forge new units of measurement.
They are just some of the weird scales that exist
in the shadows of the formal SI units and their spinoffs.
With the redefinition of our beloved kilogram,
ampere, kelvin and mole imminent, now is the perfect
moment to acknowledge those other units that
escape the close scrutiny applied to scientific inquiry.
Yes, they may lack the precision of nature’s numbers,
such as the Planck constant – the cornerstone of the
new kilogram measurement – but they more than
make up for that deficiency with grit, character and
insight. Or at least funny backstories.