When c Comes Out Even

In order to determine the wavelength of any electromagnetic frequency we use the formula c/f=l , where c= the speed of light, f is the frequency (cycles per second or Hertz) and l , or lambda, is the wavelength. Due to our various measuring standards these numbers are difficult to work with. The speed of light is 186,282.39… miles per second. And it is no better in the Metric system, where it is not 3 x 10¹⁰ cm/s as you might recall from school, but 2.99792458 x 10¹⁰. The reason for these strange numbers is that light – and most other irritating natural phenomena - could care less about our antiquated measuring systems.

Back to this in a moment. I want to tell you about a standard measuring tool found in interstellar space: the 21-cm neutral hydrogen "line," or HI for short. The word ‘line’ comes from lines that appear in a spectral display of high frequency energy , as divided into radio and light frequencies – together called the electromagnetic spectrum. Each basic element has a certain set of characteristic electromagnetic output caused by transitions occurring when the atoms of the element are stressed or excited by various phenomena in their environment. When a specific line, or set of lines, appears wide then the gas clouds or suns or whatever is being analyzed contain large amount of that particular element.

The most abundant element in the universe is hydrogen. The appearance of neutral hydrogen is so common that it is used as a gauge by radio astronomers to analyze many factors of interest to them. The people at the SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) Institute theorize that any other sentient races in the universe with a science similar to ours would have recognized this ubiquity of the 21-cm hydrogen and might even use this as a communications media. Therefore one of the areas of the spectrum that SETI searches in is this very range. Personally I would work on telepathy first, but that wouldn’t get much funding! Here are a couple of links to sites that have details about the math behind the 21-cm line: Wikipedia, and The Internet Encyclopedia of Science. For a history of the discovery of radio astronomy, see this page on the SETI League website.

Metric vs English. The meter was supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the Earth's equator to the pole. This was pretty accurate but essentially no better as a "real world" reference than the English feet and inches, or the Japanese sun (1.193 inches) and shaku (11.93 inches) systems. There was no physical standard that one can point at and say, "Look, there’s a Meter." But the concept was oh so very scientific and elaborate methods were used to establish a "real" world standard metal meter stored in a temperature-controlled box and later, even more elaborate methods created atomic sources and counters to "prove" that a meter was just as long as it was. Does this sound scientific? More of a patchwork to me, but there were more people on the committees that voted Metric when it was decided would be the international standard, so patchwork won over common and useful. If you don't like this and live in the US, you still have a slim chance: we have not officially adopted the Metric, of SI system, but we have done a lot of adaptation.

By the way, the foot is derived from the length of human feet. Obviously not an average. The inch, while it may have been credited to some king’s thumb length, actually comes from the Anglo Saxon word ynce which paralleled the Latin uncia, or one twelfth of a foot. The sense of "foot" being a measure of 12 inches goes back into Old English and Old High German.

"Oh, no!" you moan. "Not Yet Another Standard Measurement System?!?" Well, hold on. There are as good reasons to look askance at the antiquated, patchwork Metric system, just as the Metric supporters looked askance at older foot and inch (and all other) systems. The great advantage that Metric has had nothing to do with the arbitrary length of the Meter, but the use of 10-base numbering throughout. No longer a need to know the length of furlongs and certainly no consideration of fortnights, unless you are a wishy-washy English major.

The meter was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of krypton 86 in 1960. So…why didn’t it come out even? Or why didn’t "we" find an easily excitable gas that would match the meter? Because this is still a patchwork, after-the-fact, look-what-we-found-now, complex system. After all, feet and furlongs can be defined just as precisely using our modern laboratory standards.

Well, how about a system that cleanses us of all earthly, dirty, human, and mundane semi-standards and gets us up to a standard that might be useful to accompany us on our march ( stumble?) into space? Further, it would be a system based on a reference to be found anywhere in the universe, even on Earth!

It turns out that the actual wavelength of the 21-cm line of interstellar neutral hydrogen is 21.1 cm, or about 8.31 inches. Hmm, a little less than a foot, considerably shorter than that oversized Meter stick. And – forgetting science for the moment, a kind of a comfy, homey length that we foot- and-inch users could feel comfortable with - sort of. You can hold 8.3 inches in your hand and walk around with it without bumping into things. Of course the flexible tape measure makes this part of the presentation dissolve quite quickly, but just the same an 8-inch ruler feels good.

Now this is a rather important point. Japan adopted the Metric system, but the guys on the shop floor still and measure in shaku and sun, just as construction people in the US carry English measuring tools and talk about "the whole 9 yards," and stuff like that. I wear size 13 shoes (average ~ 13", so add one foot for every 12 stesp, depending on which shoes I have on) and use that length to pace off rooms and the like, and I certainly am not going to think how many (3!) of my shoes it takes to make a meter. Likewise, nobody I know gives a damn about the metric system, until their 14 mm wrench slips off of the ½" nut when they’re under the car, all full of beer and grease: that’s when you’ll hear metric defined in a real world sense!

I mention the Japanese measurement system because I had read a few years back how the Japanese were still using their older system. As I was putting this article together I began a search for these measurement names and found almost nothing. It was only thru e-mail received from Christian Hamacher, who found my furlong page, that I found a link to a great converter page which mentioned the Japanese pre-metric measurement system.

So - grudgingly - you might admit that the 8.3 inch guy isn’t as overwhelming as this ugly Meter, but can we use this reasoning as the basis for a new measuring standard? No, but it is a positive human factor that no one who developed the Metric system cared about. If we are going to even consider some new system it should contain elements of our more advanced technical knowledge as well as our somewhat improved knowledge about the human psyche and its dislike to having stuff shoved down its throat. You might be interested in what some others say about "metrication." and this one is also good and don't miss Inch Perfect.

Let’s get back to scientific aspects. After all, this is where the money is! Today the main goal of the science industry is funding, and the main activity is writing proposals that will assure that funding. This sort of keeps people in some semblance of reality. No production, no cash. Publish or perish. No reality check, no pay check.

A more mundane comparison might be selling your home. Let’s say you are greedy and you find a real estate agent who is also greedy and you put your $200K house on the market for $300K. Then you get lucky because of a housing crunch and a buyer says, "Yes! I need a place to live at any cost!" Then the bank’s appraiser comes out and says, "Yup, this place is worth all of $200K and we’ll loan you 80% of that." Reality check. Oh, your luck might continue and the buyer have the cash for the difference, but not as a rule. The market sets the price.

Science is in the same boat: If there are enough people that believe that something useful is going on in your project the coffers stay full and you can have fun and still have enough to eat on.

We have this possible new measuring stick (click here for a Word document with a full-size ruler you can print and cut out). Let’s give it a neutral and semantically unloaded name, like "Z". It could be given a highly technical name or something that seemed acceptable in many languages, but a single letter simplifies that whole process. (But see a set of common usage names below.)

This Z can be derived as 21.106110405 cm, (or 1.04917831886781E-03 surveyors furlongs, if you insist!) by counting the frequency very accurately with state-of-the-art, cesium-based frequency standards. This gives us some 1.420405752 GHz (giga Hertz or billions of cycles per second). Hertzian waves are sine waves and the measurement parameter "cycles-per-second" was renamed ~25 years ago in Heinrich Hertz’s honor, in what I consider a very unscientific gesture: now even square waves are defined in Hz. Now we divide c – the speed of light, in whatever system – to get the wavelength, but of course c is presently based on a system of measurement that has nothing to do with physics!

The problem in the basis of measurement of the speed of light is the result of these klutzy and cumbersome numbers.

Now we come to the matter of the most sacred cow of all: the time standard. The second is based on being a smaller division of minutes, which are minutiae or minor parts of an hour, and the hour is somewhat similar to the inch, one of twelve – in the American system – of two sets to give a day, and we wind up with the wonderful and comfortable 84,600 seconds in a day. Actually the whole concept of 24/12/60 comes from the early Sumerians. Cornell's "Curious About Astronomy" webpage has an interesting writeup. The history of the overall steps in dividing time is covered on this page on Wikipedia.

Why did "we" leave this alone? Too many Mickey - or Minnie - Mouse watches in the world?

Let’s get rid of our "always divisible by six" time system and see what we would have with decimal (d) time division, based on our current second:

Or, trying to keep in touch with our period of planetary rotation, we could work backward, dividing the 23 hr 56.xx minutes by ten, and with 2.4 hours we come close to the 2.78 hour-long "dhour" above. Still we are so far off of what we are used to that we would be laughed out of the hallowed halls of anyplace.

"Wait!" you’re screeching. "How dare you mess with my time standard?" Which one? Oh you mean this very "scientific" system that our forefathers patched together in Europe and the Middle East over centuries and then shoved down the throat of the "primitive" cultures around the world?

Our time only matches the Earth’s movements close enough to get you to work on time. What we have defined very precisely is the second, everything else being multiples or subdivisions of that period. Everything else needs tweaking to match the real world where our planet wobbles and shakes and recesses and all so that we have to add that occasional day in February and leap seconds here and there.

Changing the basis for our time system would probably be much less of a hassle than the Y2K problem. We could even ride on the tailcoats of the knowledge gained therein to implement some new time system. Implementing it would be the nightmare, but no worse than the metrification project.

In a similar fashion to the "standard" for the Meter, in 1967 the second was defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium radiation. But again, an after-the-fact way of arriving at a standard. So how about an even number for a change?

If we count the number of 21-cm waves until they reach 10⁹ It would take .7040241836... of our current second. Now, using the same time table as above, we would have:

Back in the beginning paragraph I mentioned deriving wavelength from a given frequency by dividing it into the speed of light. What has happened to the speed of light in our world of the re-worked standards?

Why select the 21-cm line as a standard for use in space? Because no matter where you go you can set your "watch."

You need a stable source of Hl. As the transitions at this energy of hydrogen occur only once in ~10 million years, a "lab standard" might be difficult to create. Spectral displays of the HI line from radio telescopes show various degrees of broadening and shifting due to interstellar Doppler effect. Even a source that is stable here (and now) on Earth would be shifting if you were on a spaceship bound for some other system.

In outer space - as it is on Earth - nothing is stable, only more so. Everything is moving. Relativity in action. There is no spot you can point to and say, "There! That radio galaxy is at rest. That will be our standard." So, in order to have a standard source you would need a local generator. Can you build an Hl source as you would a cesium standard? With current technology it doesn't.

But I do know that we can use current standard instruments to measure the components of the QZ system. The only advantage of my idea is one of using two measurement parameters based on the real world as defined by current physics.

It would also help in establishing communications with non-human civilizations somewhere down the road if we didn't come toting Earth-based standards, waving yard and meter sticks. Assuming an advanced enough civilization the other entities might appreciate a non-ethnic measurement standard.

To finish this article up I need to go back around 30 years to the days of my early employment at the Berkeley campus of the University of California (UCB). In 1967 I began to conceive and write up notes and concepts for a science fiction story based on the slow expansion of humans out beyond the solar system.

I continued this project off and on and the concept expanded until it became so top heavy with details and interwoven plots and was about eight volumes in (projected) length. At this time (1972) I found myself working in the Space Sciences Laboratory at UCB, and exposed to all kinds of really spiffy science stuff that helped me enhance my now epic-size work, bogging myself down with even more baggage to assure that it would never get finished. However, I did do a couple of spin-off short stories and submitted those. That story story is over there.

This was where I found the concept of the 21-cm measurement techniques and thought, "Ah hah! A truly universal measurement standard."

In addition to many years spent at the electronics bench I have also worked as a high tech purchasing agent. It was an easy jump to tie these pieces together, envision and write up a scene where a not-so-far-distant future PA would be arranging for shipping times between planets not only with different time bases due to their planetary cycles, but even weird growing seasons and the like:

"Jon made at least one use every day of the computer terminal that was designed as a planetary time translator. Using the Galactic Standard Period (Q) based on the radio-wave length emission of hydrogen, the computer would give out the current date and time in both Galactic Standard (GS) and local terminology of any city in the explored galaxy. Correspondingly it could calculate the lead times for specific products given the time - in local planetary time standards - that was required for the production of the item of interest. Now one could add in transport times from plant to plant, receiving and inspection delays and fudge factors, and realize a fairly reasonable estimate for the item to be on the production line.

"A plantation director on Arcturus IV wants 500 Mark III bamboo cutters, atomic powered, self-propelled and they must be swamp tested on site before the rainy season starts so that they are ready for the harvest, which must be started with the first rain and finished three days later or the whole thing is lost. These cutters must be shipped from the manufacturer's plant on Sirius III but can't be started until the latest prints are received. Arcturus IV (settled later) has local intelligent race but they don't care about our measuring so we use GS at our stations, but Sirius III is based on the ancient Earth standard (metric) and their own 24-hour clock based on their planet's rotation period of ~28 old Earth hours...."

"So," you will ask. "All of these rambling machinations are your justification - no, rationalization - for YASM?"

Of course not. The whole notion came about as a scientific way to approach the problem of interplanetary and interstellar measurement standards, and, as they say in the recent vernacular, "Hey, it works for me!"

technical name	common name	= English	= Metric
measure	measure	8.31in	21.1 cm
decameasure	decem	6.9 ft	2.11 m
*centameasure	centem	69.2 ft	21.1 m
kilomeasure	kilem	692 ft	211 m
decakilom	deklom	1.31 mi	2.11 km

technical name	common name	Old Earth Standard
span	span	0.704 sec
* decaspan	despan	7.04 sec
centaspan	cespan	1.17 min
* kilospan	kispan	11.7 min
dekilospan	dekspan	1.95 hr
standard day	day	19.5 hr
standard week	week	8.14 days
standard quarter	quarter	81.4 days
standard year	year	2.23 years

Once more, I humbly accept all credit for all of the above - and much, much more.

When c Comes out Even