Think “you wake up in the woods naked,” Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?
My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit’s dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.
I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.
That’s as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.
Re Celsius 0 °: the reason I thought perhaps Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine might be a more absolute thing to take de novo temperature from was because I don’t actually know the answer to “how can you ensure water is exactly freezing temperature?” If it’s solid ice it could be colder, if it’s liquid it’s probably warmer, and even if it’s a bucket of cold distilled water with distilled water ice in it, isn’t it still likely hotter than 0 ° C? I feel like there’s probably something involving equilibrium between solid and liquid water that would be difficult to sus out
Not that Weird Brine is any better really 🤦♀️