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Robert P. Crease

World in the Balance – The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement Hardcover – 28 Oct. 2011

by Robert P. Crease (Author)

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Millions of transactions each day depend on a reliable network of weights and measures. This network has been called a greater invention than the steam engine, comparable only to the development of the printing press.

Robert P. Crease traces the evolution of this international system from the use of flutes to measure distance in the dynasties of ancient China and figurines to weigh gold in West Africa to the creation of the French metric and British imperial systems. The former prevailed, with the United States one of three holdout nations. Into this captivating history Crease weaves stories of colorful individuals, including Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of the metric system, and American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, the first to tie the meter to the wavelength of light. Tracing the dynamic struggle for ultimate precision, World in the Balance demonstrates that measurement is both stranger and more integral to our lives than we ever suspected.

ISBN-10

9780393072983
ISBN-13

978-0393072983
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

28 Oct. 2011
Language

English
Dimensions

16.76 x 3.05 x 24.38 cm
Print length

320 pages
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Product description

About the Author

Robert P. Crease is the chairman of the philosophy department at Stony Brook University and the author of several books on science, including The Quantum Moment and The Great Equations. He lives in New York City.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393072983
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (28 Oct. 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780393072983
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393072983
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.76 x 3.05 x 24.38 cm

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4.0 24 ratings

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Richard Leach

A fine history, but...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2012

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This is a good historical review of the field of metrology and mankind's search for a universal system of measurement standards. Most of the action takes place around the time of the French Revolution, and this is rightly so. However, the author concentrates much effort on China and West Africa (especially too much effort here), and almost ignores some of the amazing feats of the ancients, especially Egypt and the Middle East. As a scientist, I found the discussions on art and deep philosophy boring and over-emphasised. In fact, I skipped the arty parts. The build up from French Revolution to the latest meeting at the Royal Society is good and kept me reading, but much of the really interesting details about the new SI unit definitions are weak or missing (e.g. the Metrological Triangle). Also note the National Physical Laboratory (and INRIM) also took part in the development of COXI (not just PTB and NIST). So, a good history but a weak ending. The Epilogue was, in my humble opinion, totally unnecessary and ruined the end of the book.

2 people found this helpful

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lwuzzo

Measurement understood by all

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 February 2012

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Some helpful history here; and, if the author has been selective about the past, he doesn't pretend otherwise. Some criticism about his own country, the USA, features (though not matching his gratuitous insults about British colonialism). I find the title absurd, and there are some odd errors in the table on p.142. But the overall run of the book, and in particular the concluding chapters brought me new and welcome knowledge.

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Daniel

Super interesting and informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 November 2018

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Very well researched and culturally + historically founded book. Surprisingly fun to read considering what I expected from the topic!

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J. David Rollinson

Informative and Entertaining

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 September 2014

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Not an obvious subject for an entertaining book but life's full of surprises. I bought this for my son to gather information for a school project and enjoyed the style enough to read it cover to cover.
Brilliant.

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Interactive

Measurement from a politically correct American's perspective

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2013

This is a book by an American, written in American, for Americans, and, where the author finds possible, about Americans.

Despite the subject matter being the history of measurement, the book also manages to include some rabid anti-British sentiments and a nauseatingly politically-correct outlook on the world. He says Britain's "horrendous treatment of cultures in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the nineteenth century did much to destabilise indigenous cultures, disrupt habit and infrastructures, and wipe out local measuring systems", yet most of the book is an account of the elimination of flawed, local measurement systems, a process which the author seems to enthusiastically endorse, with the possible exception of the fate of a weird West African system of weights that was based on factors other than just the weight of an object. His view of the fate of that system exposes his politically correct perspective: he condemns the lack of understanding of the system by Western scholars because they approached the problem from the perspective "of the white man", perhaps Japanese scholars would have fared better? I wonder what his views are on the genocide perpetrated by Americans on the native Indians, which the British attempted to curtail, and on slavery which existed for so much of American history and the overt legal, practical and institutional racial discrimination that lasted for a further hundred years after slavery was abolished.

Being written in American he refers to different parts of Paris as being separated by so many "blocks", he doesn't have access to words like "orientate" and instead uses the word "orient", and he is "obligated" all the time, rather than "obliged", and we get quite a lot of self-indulgent personal tales, including a lengthy and content-free episode in which he gets himself and his wife scanned by a machine.

The book is apparently based on a series of articles he has written for Physics World magazine, and it shows. Some of the chapters are oddly discordant; large amounts of text is devoted to his favourite subject of the West African weights system and the associated culture, there are some odd chapters on artists and other characters such as Michelle Duchamp who had an interest in the metre. Several chunks of text are repeated, presumably because originally the articles were separate and no knowledge of the other articles was presumed, and the overall effect is that the analysis is lopsided. There are also errors: he thinks that there are 14 ounces in a stone according to his table on Imperial measurements.

The history of British units is barely mentioned at all, only where they replace local units in some primitive land, yet if an American declares an opinion on relevant issues, we are treated to a mini biography of the character and a deep analysis of the comment. We are treated to a succession of American legislative activity and documents that are connected to measurement, and a constant stream of history of the US coast survey and its employees. In the same vein we are kept fully abreast of all of the milestones in the US's engagement with the international scientific community culminating in the first attendance of an American at an international conference in the late nineteenth century.

Mention of people outside of the US is seemingly reluctant at best, James Maxwell gets a grudging mention because of his suggestion that the wavelength of light could be a means of providing a natural way of defining the metre, but this seems just an excuse for a chapter's worth of a biography of an American who spent years arguing with people, being ill, having marital problems and using diffraction gratings in an attempt to measure the wavelength accurately before ending his days isolated and penniless.

There is some interesting stuff in the book and it was worth reading, despite the often poor typesetting, the text changes size across the page as do the number of lines between pages, and the diagrams are often poorly printed, but there have to be better books on the subject than this, preferably less parochial, less partisan, less indulgent and less disjointed, and which don't reek of a political agenda and which are written in English.

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