A Scoville rating doesn’t measure heat directly. In 1912 a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville dissolved dried pepper in alcohol, then kept diluting the extract in sugar water until a small panel of tasters could no longer feel any burn. The rating is how far it had to be diluted. A jalapeño at a few thousand units means a few thousand parts sugar water to quiet it; the hottest peppers need more than a million. Labs now measure the chemicals with a machine and convert the answer back into Scoville’s units, because those units were the ones everybody already understood. So the hottest pepper in the world is famous for how much water it takes to make it go away.