To facilitate international trade, manufacturing and scientific communication, most countries use a standard system of units sanctioned by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

The seven base units include the meter and second. The 20 prefixes include mega, giga and tera, meaning, in order, million, billion and trillion.

High-frequency trading, satellite navigation, the intensity of X-rays and even the precise way Lego bricks fit together benefit from the system of measures. But its list of prefixes tops out at yotta, or septillion, a number with 24 zeros.

That may not be enough.

In 10 or 15 years, Dr. Brown, who is head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., anticipates the amount of computerized data worldwide will exceed 1 yottabyte in size, and without expanding the list of prefixes, there will be no way to talk about the next great chunk of numbers.

Even worse, dilettantes could fill the void by popularizing glib prefixes such as bronto or hella—terms that have already won fans.

Without professional intervention, Dr. Brown fears, the next numerical prefix could become the Boaty McBoatface of weights and measures.

“The most dangerous thing for people who set rules is that these prefixes get so widely adopted, they become de facto the names,” Dr. Brown said of the informal modifiers. “Then you have no option other than to use them.”

For the record, there is an argument to be made for adopting a prefix like bronto: giga and tera are based on the Greek words for “giant” and “monstrous.” Why not make bronto, named for the brontosaurus, official, perhaps along with tyranno, stego, colosso or even yeti?

Dr. Brown is sympathetic to the argument but unconvinced.

Instead, he proposes four prefixes that adhere to recent naming conventions: ronna and quecca for octillion (27 zeros) and nonillion (30 zeros), along with ronto and quecto for their fractional counterparts, octillionth and nonillionth.

Like the latest sanctioned prefixes, Dr. Brown’s proposals are loosely related to Latin and Greek words for numbers (in this case, nine and 10). And like most of the prefixes, his suggestions end in “a” or “o.”

But the process of expanding, or even amending, the official measurements is lengthy.

After decades of debate, the bureau only last year agreed to redefine the kilogram, a measure that for more than a century has been tied to the mass of a metal cylinder sanctioned in 1889 and stored in France. The new definition, based on a fixed numerical value for the amount of energy that light carries at a given frequency, takes effect in May.

Meanwhile, the last prefixes were added in 1991, when zetta, yotta, zepto and yocto standing for sextillion, septillion, sextillionth and septillionth, were sanctioned.

The Bureau of Weights and Measures Consultative Committee for Units will consider Dr. Brown’s proposal when it meets in Paris in October, but there is no guarantee that the proposal will pass muster. The executive secretary, Estefania de Mirandes, declined to speculate, and even if the committee likes the idea, final approval would take years.

The group, which meets on average every three years, could ask Dr. Brown for more work, or it could forward his proposal to the International Committee for Weights and Measures.

That group meets each year. If it approved the proposal, it would then forward it to the General Conference on Weights and Measures, a group that convenes every four years.

“They would make the ultimate decision,” Dr. Brown said. “They meet next in 2022, then in 2026.”

Even then, the proposal could be rejected.

A potential sticking point is that Dr. Brown’s primary reason for coining the terms is to ensure that big data can grow even bigger with a vocabulary to match.

Computer scientists and engineers, borrowing official prefixes, already use megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte to describe the capacity of a computer hard drive. But “byte” isn’t a unit under the control of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, and serving the data community isn’t traditionally a concern of the bureau.

In addition, since the last expansion, the Consultative Committee of Units has resisted efforts to add more prefixes.

In 1995, it debated the need to extend the range, Dr. Brown said. The discussion continued in 2001, when the group decided it wasn’t required. And in 2010, it reiterated that decision.

“This is a relatively conservative community,” Dr. Brown said. “Things change slowly.”

But this year, if the time is right, he’s got their number.

Appeared in the March 9, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

In “Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine,” Thomas Hager, a veteran science writer, chronicles a range of drug-related breakthroughs, tracking the experimental efforts, occasional missteps and eureka moments that preceded them. The story, though filled with remarkable achievements, is of course not entirely a triumphalist one.

Opium, for instance, derived from the poppy plant, has been in use for at least 10,000 years, making it one of the oldest drugs known to man, and it has been an important trading item since Roman times. As Mr. Hager emphasizes, opium and its derivatives and synthetic forms—most recently fentanyl—have freed millions from intractable pain, but they have also condemned millions to the travails of addiction and to early death. In the 19th century, with a quarter of its population addicted, China resisted the importation of opium, leading to two wars with Britain, the principal player in the opium trade. Enormous resources have been poured into decoupling the pain-killing power of opiates from their powerful addictive nature, Mr. Hager notes, but so far without success.

For millennia, drugs were found in nature, from plants most of all. But in the 1830s the first non-natural drug was developed in a laboratory, and the modern drug industry was born. That drug was the sedative chloral hydrate, from which chloroform, one of the first anesthetics, was derived.

Mr. Hager introduces us to the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-73), “a true genius, a great teacher, who was passionate about applying chemistry to everything—especially living processes.” It was Liebig’s investigations—as he was “playing with molecules, learning what transformed one into another”—that led him to turn chloral hydrate into a sweet-smelling liquid whose fumes, as it happened, induced a loss of consciousness. A couple of decades later chloroform was being used in surgery. But like so many drugs, chloral hydrate was liable to misuse. When combined with alcohol, it produced so-called knock-out drops, what Mr. Hager calls “the original date-rape drug.” The same combination—supposedly used for fleecing customers and credited to a Chicago saloon keeper—became the fabled “Mickey Finn.”

Other discoveries, as Mr. Hager shows, emerged from more deliberate pursuit. In the 1960s, a Japanese college student, Akira Endo, having read a biography of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, wondered whether mold might yield not only antibiotics but drugs that would lower cholesterol in the blood. A decade later, as a research scientist, he pursued the idea. He went through almost 4,000 molds, Mr. Hager says, before finding what he was looking for—in a mold that was spoiling a bag of rice in a Kyoto grain shop. Another member of the genus Penicillium, it produced the first statin, a class of drugs now taken by tens of millions of people every day.

One of the revelations of Mr. Hager’s chronicle is the role that serendipity can play. A mid-20th-century French surgeon named Henri Laborit wanted a drug that would calm his patients before their operations and prevent surgical shock. At the time, antihistamines were being investigated for their ability to help hay-fever and cold sufferers. But antihistamines had side effects, one of which was to make patients drowsy. Laborit thought this side effect might be just what he needed. He asked the French drug company Rhône-Poulenc for help. As luck would have it, Rhône-Poulenc had been trying to find better antihistamines and had a number of failures on the shelf. One of them, called RP-4560, was especially ineffective. It didn’t stop runny noses, but it did make patients drowsy. It was all side effect.

Laborit tried it, and it worked wonders keeping patients calm. One day, Laborit happened to be talking with the head of psychiatry at his hospital, who was bemoaning the need to keep so many of his patients in restraints to prevent them from harming themselves or others. Laborit suggested RP-4560. A patient who had been admitted twice for violent irrational behavior was given a dose 10 times what Laborit used on his surgical patients. The patient fell asleep after a few hours, and when he woke up he stayed calm for an additional 18 hours. After three weeks of treatment, he was, Mr. Hager writes, “rational enough to play bridge.” Thus was born the first anti-psychotic drug.

While sticking mostly to history, Mr. Hager touches on the economics of the drug industry. It costs billions of dollars to bring a drug to market, he reminds us, and many candidates never make it, pushing up the price of those that do. When a blockbuster drug does erupt, it can be enormously profitable. The statin Lipitor “became the most commercially successful drug in history,” with sales of more than $120 billion between 1996 and 2011. Rare diseases, because the potential return on investment is so much lower, get short shrift.

Mr. Hager previews the wonders yet to come, such as drugs with sensors that send a signal when they are taken, helping the elderly or the mentally ill to keep their doses on a strict schedule. Super computers allow the modeling of ever more complex molecules, speeding up drug development. The ability to read the genomes of individual patients and manipulate their DNA holds out enormous promise. If Mr. Hager’s well-written and engaging chronicle is any guide, there may be unforeseen downsides to such developments, but the upside will certainly be worth celebrating.

Appeared in the March 6, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

One hundred years ago, at the beginning of 1919, few people outside Germany had ever heard of Albert Einstein. By the year’s end, however, he had become a worldwide celebrity and a symbol of human genius. What made Einstein’s reputation was one of the most important experiments in 20^th century science: a challenging, incredibly precise observation of a solar eclipse that proved his general theory of relativity for the first time.

The special theory of relativity, published by Einstein in 1905, introduced a new understanding of space and time, including the equation that linked energy, mass and the speed of light: E = mc². It was followed 10 years later by his general theory, in which Einstein extended the concept to include accelerated motion and gravity, based on a highly sophisticated mathematical conception of “space-time.”

But for all of its later fame, the theory of relativity made no impact on the general public when first published in 1905. Even some distinguished scientists rejected it. In 1910, the great physicist Earnest Rutherford joked that Anglo-Saxons like himself had “too much sense” to understand such an abstruse theory. To overcome such skepticism, Einstein had to find a way for his ideas to be experimentally confirmed.

His solution had to do with the way that light travels through the cosmos. According to Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, which had been generally accepted by physicists since the 17th century, light rays are attracted by gravitational forces because light is made of tiny particles that Newton called “corpuscles.” On their journey from a distant star to our eyes on Earth, the trajectory of these particles would be very slightly curved  or “deflected: by the gravity of the sun.

Einstein agreed with Newton’s idea, but in 1915-16 he used his general theory of relativity to recalculate the deflection of light and found that it would actually be twice the amount predicted by Newton. If the magnitude of the actual deflection could be measured, it would show whose theory of gravity was correct, Newton’s or Einstein’s. “The examination of the correctness or otherwise of this deduction is a problem of the greatest importance, the early solution of which is to be expected of astronomers,” wrote Einstein.

The first opportunity to test Einstein’s predictions would come on May 29, 1919, when a total solar eclipse would allow telescopes to observe starlight as it passed the rim of the darkened solar eclipse would allow telescopes to observe starlight as it passed the rim of the darkened solar disc. Exceptional care would be required, given that Einstein’s calculated deflection was only 1.7 seconds of arc– that is, a displacement of a mere sixtieth of a millimeter on a photographic plate.

The opportunity was seized by the British astronomer royal, Frank Dyson, and a leading Cambridge astronomer, Arthur Eddington, who had become a convinced advocate of general relativity. In 1917, even as World War 1 was raging, Dysom persuaded the British government to budget £1,000 for a team of four astronomers led by Eddington to observe the coming eclipse. Two would be stationed on Principe, an island off the coast of West Africa, and the other two in Sobral, a city in north eastern Brazil.

Both expeditions faced formidable technical problems, from monkey interfering with the telescopes to high temperatures (which distorted, the photographs) and cloudy skies. As Eddington, in Principe, recorded in his diary, “The first 10 photo graphs show practically no stars. The last six show a few images which I hope will give us what we need; but it is very disappointing.” The measurements on one plate agreed with Einstein’s predicted deflection, and another provided at least some further confirmation. Eddington sent Dyson a noncommittal telegram: “Through cloud. Hopeful.”

Once back in England, Eddington developed four more Principe plates. He detected in them Einstein’s value for the deflection of starlight, though within a rather large margin of error. Fortunately, the Sobral plates provided conclusive support for Einstein’s theory.

In November 1919, Eddington presented his conclusions to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London. The greatest names in British physics, astronomy and mathematics attended, though not Einstein himself, who remained .in Berlin. J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron and president of the Royal Society, declared that “this is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day. If it is sustained that Einstein’s reasoning holds good … then it is the result of one of the highest achievements of human thought.”

Almost immediately, the British proof of a German theory was seen — in Britain, at least — as a sign of hope for international reconciliation after World War I. But in defeated Germany, Einstein’s theory of relativity was regarded with growing and often anti-Semitic suspicion, culminating in the publication of “A Hundred Authors Against Einstein” in 1931. As Einstein wrote in 1921 to a German colleague, “The English have behaved much more nobly than our colleagues here.”

Few people, English or otherwise, have ever fully understood general relativity. Einstein himself was baffled that the theory had elicited such “passionate resonance” and made him an international celebrity. But of the theory itself there is no doubt: In the century since 1919, general relativity has been confirmed again and again by increasingly accurate astronomical measurements. Today it accounts for both the amazing accuracy of the Global Positioning System and for our understanding of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

Mr. Robinson is the author of “Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity.” His new. book on Einstein will be published later this year by Yale University Press.

Appeared Appin the February 16, 17, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal