Joelle cleaning, remembering the Incandenza Thanksgiving (p. 745)
At some point out of nowhere, little Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. […] Hal, whom Joelle wasn’t crazy about, kept asking wasn’t anybody going to ask him the freezing-temperature of platinum.
Context
Same Thanksgiving, a page on: the lexical prodigy at maybe ten, seen for once from outside the family and unlovingly — reciting a definition "for no one in particular" and then begging the table to quiz him on it. Verbal performance as a bid for attention nobody at that table knows how to answer; the child version of the machine Joelle's follicles are reacting to in the mother.