Jan 20 2008
A history of measurement
Choosing reading material for the bus is hard. I’ve been avoiding starting The Amber Spyglass again because it’s such a hefty book and we only have it in hardback. But lately I’ve been reading Ian Whitelaw’s fantastic little pocket guide to the history of measurement — A Measure of All Things.
It’s the kind of book that Edward Tufte would be incredibly proud of. Each double page is a topic in itself. The whole book is beautifully laid out and typeset. The ideas are elegantly and briefly explained — the history of the measures, the names of the units and where they come from, the evolution of the sizes of those units (because they haven’t been constant), and the gentle precipitation of a unified and universal unit of measurement based (mostly) on fundamental facts of the universe.
It’s best said by Lord Kelvin, as quoted at the beginning of the book:
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.