Skip to main content

Beyond Measure - James Vincent *****

Although not all science is quantitative, most fundamental science is - and measurement is, in effect, the foundation of quantitative science. In this engaging exploration, James Vincent looks into both the historical origins of measurement and the development of standards, including the way that they have changed over the centuries. For those who regard metres and kilograms an evil imposition of the EU, he gives the heretical view that the introduction of the metric system in France was 'the single most significant event in the history of measurement' - and it's hard to imagine any scientist would argue with this.

What's clever about Vincent's approach is that he combines the TV documentary style of visiting places and talking to people (arguably not strictly necessary for the topic, but making it more engaging) with far more depth than a TV show can ever cover. So, for example, to bring us into the early days of measurement in the Nile delta, he starts us off in a car with a professor of Eygyptology from the American University in Cairo, who we discover 'addresses everyone she talks to [on the phone] as "sweetie" or "habibi"' which she explains is not because she's on friendly terms with all these people but because she can't remember anyone's name. This kind of little personal detail that can make a popular science title accessible to readers who don't often dip into a science book.

Vincent goes on to cover topics such as temperature, the metric system, land measurement (the origin of the word geometry), statistics and the place of measurement in modern society. Politics and sociological impact come into this to a, perhaps, surprising extent. I've already hinted at the culture clash between metric and Imperial units - something that has left the UK in a state of weird compromise, while the US outside of science still pretty much ignores metric units (with occasional problematic outcomes). However, from early on Vincent highlights that the scientific need for measurement isn't met with delight by everyone - noting the criticism, for example, of Newton for supposedly ignoring the beauty of nature by only focussing on metrics. This is a claim that has been easily refuted by pointing out that with science we can still appreciate the beauty, but get far more out of what we observe as well... but Vincent shows us other impacts of measurement that (particularly historically) have had negative impact when those measurements were misinterpreted and misused to political ends.

If I'm honest, I'm probably not the ideal target for Vincent's approach, in that I find most TV science documentaries unwatchable because of the journalistic, interview-oriented style - but having said that I can cope with this when there's as much detail underlying it, as Vincent is able to provide. I did, however, almost give up after reading the introduction, which is distinctly stodgy. Reading 'Measurement is the root of all tectonic arts' made me wonder if the book was going to be painfully pretentious - but thankfully, this seems primarily an issue limited to the introduction.

All in all, I can confidently say this is a book that measures up extremely well to expectations.

A quick postscript on the cover - I usually show the UK version of a book here, but for this book I was first contacted by the US publisher several months after the UK publication, hence this being the US cover and quite a late review.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more