The External Referent

The issue of using an external referent has many complexities. For example, consider standard international (SI) units. Science has long recognized the value and importance of standard measures, like ohms and grams and decibels. Really, the principle of reproducibility rests squarely on this idea--I cannot reliably reproduce your experiment if I use one type of unit and you use something else that may or may not directly translate.

On the other hand, as scientists learn more about the way things work, and develop increased precision, one familiar unit of measure after another gives way to a precise standard, usually tied to a relatively abstract and often invisible (to us) phenomenon like the width of hydrogen's line in a mass spectroscope or the number of vibrations in a finely crafted tuning fork. While these careful and deliberately defined units make science work more effectively, we often find them hard to relate to in our daily life.

The time-honored units replaced by these scientific split-hairs sprang from tasks we no longer perform or from ways of looking at the world few of us still have. The furlong, approximately 220 yards, derived from the length of a furrow--it also applied to one side of an acre and to 1000 links of chain. These units have little meaning for most people today, but when the units came into use, everyone who used them could visualize their external referent.

When Robert Crease asked his readers about their favorite standard unit, he was deluged with answers. In his follow-up post, he compares some "pre-SI" units with those in use in the lab today. Surveyors used a unit called a chain, a actual piece of metal chain 22 yards long, to measure land area--a vivid and unequivocally external referent point. Farmers and land owners could easily picture a "collop", defined as the area needed to graze "one sow or two yearling heifers or six sheep or twelve goats or six geese and a gander."

In explaining the appeal of these old, familiar, approximate, good-enough measures, author Eric Cross notes that they were:

reckoned on the things a man could see about him, so that, wherever he was, he had an almanac.

Or in other words, a different kind of external referent. It would seem to suggest that the referent we choose will serve us more effectively if we and those we intend to share our results with have some method for visualizing the basis of the referent.

Really? We Still Read About This?

In this new century, with breakthroughs in neuroscience, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and many other scientific and technological fields, do we really still get excited about a groundhog pulled out of its den and waved in the air? This year, Reuters reports, over 12,000 people attended this childish theatrical event, some of whom:

came from as far as Chile and the Netherlands

Setting aside the likelihood that anyone would come to freezing Pennsylvania from where it is currently summer SOLELY to see this event, and overlooking the forced nature of this event, what does this say about our culture?

Reuters provides a delicious if perhaps inadvertent, commentary on this foolishness by noting that other groundhog viewing occur around the country, and:

New York City's "Staten Island Chuck" did not see his shadow.

Well, duh. What are the odds that every place in the US would have the "same" weather at the "same" time? Even if every groundhog had the "same" experience, does "winter" mean the "same" thing in all 50 states? Not hardly.