NPR has a story about the official prototype of the kilogram, it is ‘mysteriously’ losing weight. Obviously a terrorist plot. For over 120 years this sensational standard, housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France, has provided the definitive definition of mass for the world (minus the “Coalition of the Weighing”). Physicists will be dismayed, chemists are contemplating career changes, biologists and geologists… really could care less since our error bars are so big anyways. So just how much weight has our faithful standard sloughed off? 50 micrograms! Clearly an international catastrophe of catastrophic proportions.

“The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart. We don’t really have a good hypothesis for it.”-Physicist Richard Davis at IBWM

Richard Davis, keeper of the kilo, at a loss over the weight loss of the sealed, air-tight, and well-guarded weight.

As NIST physicist Richard Steiner cautioned, “If somebody sneezed on that kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong”. Thankfully, it is kept well-guarded and safely ensconced in a triple-locked safe at a French chateau, rarely seeing the light of day. The mysterious nature of this caper is striking.

Perhaps, it is an inside job? Is it Al-Qaida? Hamas? The Michigan Militia? Congressional conservatives still angry that Freedom Fries didn’t become universally accepted? Is Loki playing tricks again? Is Prince of Lies pulling his shenanigans? So many questions but so few answers.

So what are we, the public whom relies on accurate standards supposed to do? Another NIST, Peter Mohr, explains, “The actual ramifications for somebody going to the store will be negligible but for scientific work, it makes a difference”.