The King's Foot

Most of the weights and measures in use in our world evolved over centuries of history, often based on correspondences to various parts of the body--usually the king's body. One apocryphal but likely account of the origins of the foot is that it was the distance from the king's elbow to his wrist--whoever this king may have been. (This distance, from the elbow to the wrist, is invariably equal to the length of the person's foot--check it out.) After all, what are kings for, and how do they differ from mere commoners if not by the divine right of kings to say whose elbow is everyone else's foot?

In any event, early in the 13th century, during the reign of good King Henry III of England, Henry decided one day, when he was particularly bored and could find nothing else to do, that he should standardize the units of measure in use throughout his kingdom. So by royal decree, the foot forevermore became the familiar one of 12 inches which we know today. (History does not record the length of Henry's foot, but I have a hunch . . . )

To jump ahead to modern times: I work in a company which uses huge mainframe computers to do much of its business--worships them almost. In fact, the Computer Center is a modern temple of white stone hidden away in the trees, presided over by a priesthood who speaks a secret language unknown to linguists and laymen alike. Fittingly, they have their own standards of measurement as well. They measure computer horsepower in a unit called MIPS, which is an acronym for Million Instructions Per Second. What this measures, roughly, is the number of internal instructions, in computer language, the mainframe is capable of processing. What it really means, is how fast the computer can talk to itself. Inner babble is the only thing measured in MIPS.

Now all standards of measurement have in them an element of the arbitrary. MIPS was created a few decades back when a bunch of industry elders got together and agreed that a certain pile of work would be the standard pile, and a computer which could process this pile in a certain length of time would be said to have so many MIPS of power. A little more democratic than King Henry's foot, but just as arbitrary.

Well, it so happens that my company has recently made the startling discovery that MIPS is a standard, and like all standards, it applies to the real world somewhat imperfectly. It's like EPA gas mileage measures: Your actual mileage may vary. And indeed, when the rating of one of our computers is 100 MIPS we don't get exactly a hundred MIPS of performance. Which for some reason upsets the priesthood. So the guys and gals in the White Temple decided to invent their own version of MIPS, using their pile of work. Henceforth, it was decreed, we will use OUR-MIPS when talking about computers talking to themselves. So while a particular computer may only give you 100 MIPS of performance, this same machine gives us 120 OUR-MIPS. So there. See the problem?

Our boss' name is Herb, and Herb doesn't have very big feet--I'm guessing 10 inches. I wondered, out loud, whether we would now decide to break with tradition, and King Henry's foot as well, and start measuring everything in Herb-Feet. My colleagues were not amused, and couldn't see the problem.

This is getting out of hand, I thought. We need some better standards, standards based on something more universal and substantial than Herb's foot or King Henry's elbow. What on earth could such standards be?

We already have a fairly good standard for time. Time is measured by reference to tiny atoms of cesium; which is a rare, soft, silvery-white alkaloid metal. Cesium is chosen for purely practical reasons: it vibrates at a highly stable and fixed rate (9 billion times a second, in case you're wondering). Actually, there are 180 cesium clocks scattered around the world in 26 different countries and each of these clocks yields a time. These various time-opinions are then averaged by a laboratory in Paris (we leave it to the French to do the math for the rest of us) and this averaged time is used as the world's universal standard time. All other standards of time are then derived by reference to this atomic standard.

Perhaps you weren't aware that we are all on Average Cesium Standard Time, but we are. And I have no quarrel with that. But length still bothers me. I say: The revolution isn't over until we get rid of King Henry's foot!

We could just pitch the whole thing in I suppose and go metric. But metric is so, well, so boring. And I am not convinced that meters are any less arbitrary than feet.

What we need is something more universal. But wait, Einstein rides to our rescue! At least, I think it's Einstein. I have a photograph on my wall, clipped from a magazine from the 1930s, which shows a pensive professor identified as Alfred Einstein looking out his study window. Based on this scant piece of documentary evidence, I have concluded that Albert Einstein did not in fact discover the theories of relativity attributed to him (and no, his first wife didn't either). It was actually his twin brother Alfred, who was painfully shy, who was the scientific genius. Albert, who basked in the glory of public attention, was just the front for poor shy Alfred. Albert Einstein was really a doppleganger. Remember, you heard it here first!

Anyway, Einstein, some Einstein, told us many useful and important things. Among these facts is that there is a fastest thing in the universe, a thing so fast nothing can go faster and nothing can even catch up. This thing is light. Yes, bucko, you heard me right, I said light. Like in light bulbs. As in those things hanging from your ceiling. Yes, I mean to say the fastest thing in the universe is whizzing around in your house right now.

Einstein used a shorthand way to refer to the speed of light, he called it simply: c. He could have called it Mr. Ed, or just about anything, but he called it c. (Actually, I think this part may have been Albert's idea.) And Einstein proved that not only was the speed of light a constant value, it had to be a constant value, or all sorts of goofy things would start happening. Now, of course, all sorts of goofy things happen in the world regularly, but they are not the kind of goofy things Einstein had in mind.

Now the important thing about light is not just that its speed is a constant, but that it is an universal constant. Yes, I said universal. Aaah, at last we seem to be getting somewhere. A universal constant. Nobody can suspect a universal constant of being arbitrary. Einstein's c sure ain't Henry's foot.

So if the universe is in fact characterized in some serious way by the speed of light, why not use this as our standard of measure? I mean we already measure REALLY BIG THINGS, like the distance between stars and galaxies, in terms of light-years, which is the distance light travels in a year. Why not measure the distance from my elbow to my wrist in the same way?

Hmmm . . . I like this. Now let's see. If light travels 186,000 miles per second (actually, it's closer to 186,300 miles per second, but hey, I said all units of measure have an element of the arbitrary), then this is, roughly, 12 billion inches per second, which means the distance from my elbow to my wrist is about 9/12 light nanoseconds, and King Henry's foot would now be one light nanosecond. A football field would then be 300 light nanoseconds long, and we could say that the Redskins were facing second and a long 20 light nanoseconds to go. Hey, I don't know about you, but it works for me.

Now this is, I submit, a vast improvement over the royalist unit of measure. If we work the math out very roughly, as I always do with math, then by happy coincidence our old measure of a foot is equal to the new measure of 1 light nanosecond. Which means we won't have to change a whole bunch of signs and stuff. We just have to talk about that same smear of space using a different unit of measure. One based in the cool indifference of universal constants, rather than the haughty arrogance of some stuffy old Englishman.

Or if you want to get really radical, we could do the math very precisely--or in any case, somebody could do the math very precisely--and we could then use this real, honest-to-God unit as our standard. After all, the universe is, in some sense, really structured around light nanoseconds. Much more so than king's elbows. And after awhile, our intuitions would begin to fall in line. Kids raised to think in light nanoseconds would find this as natural as anything in life. And we would at last be free of snooty measures.

I say: A Universal Measure for A Modern Age. This will be my rallying cry. Won't you join me?