World in the Balance

July 25, 2011
Anyone who doubts the romance and history to be found in a meter stick will find this book a revelation. As Crease notes, the human body is the first and oldest measuring device in the world; for example, nearly every civilization has the equivalent of a "foot.â In China, systems of measurement date back to the third millennium B.C.E., ., eventually becoming, as one scholar wrote, "a metaphor for the moral and spiritual order of the universeâ¦.â The first effort to create worldwide standards of distance and weight came from the French Revolution, with the meter (based on a fraction of the Earth's meridian), and the kilogram (the weight of a cubic deciliter of water). But for the terrible luck of a wayward French emissary, America might have adopted the metric system around 1800. More precise measures now define the meter in terms of atomic wavelengths, and atomic values will probably also be used to define the kilogram. Through entertaining anecdotes and history, Stony Brook philosophy chair and Physics World columnist Crease (The Great Equations) ably reveals our modern world as a "metroscapeâ shaped by the things we measure and the way we measure them. 35 illus.

November 1, 2011
A look at how weights and measures evolved over the ages, and their importance as a social bond. Physics World columnist Crease (Philosophy/Stony Brook Univ.; The Great Equations, 2009, etc.) starts with the beginning of commerce. From early times, merchants and their customers needed a set of standards that would assure both that they were getting a fair deal. Different societies arrived at different methods of attaining this goal. In China, each new dynasty needed to prove its legitimacy by "improving" its predecessors' standards for weight, length and music. In West Africa, the use of small figurines to measure gold became the keystone of society. But as trade became more international, the great trading nations began to impose their standards on their partners. Britain and France were in many ways the leaders, the former with the Imperial system, the latter, after the Revolution, with the metric system. This battle for dominance makes up much of the narrative. The meter was a philosophical construct, based in theory on the size of the Earth--specifically, on the meridian of longitude passing through Paris. The French government sent out expeditions to measure the meridian and arrived after some trouble at a standard meter. Advocates of the new system immediately began to proselytize for it, sending copies of the standard to other nations including the United States, where the "scientific" measure had a strong advocate in Thomas Jefferson. Crease also emphasizes how human nature played a part, both in the success of the new system and in the resistance to it. Especially in America, religious conservatives railed against its adoption as early as the 1860s. Meanwhile, American scientists were among those who strove to improve its accuracy. Crease provides a solid explanation of how something so arbitrary can be made truly "universal." Scientific history that looks beyond the facts and figures to their influence on everyday life.

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October 15, 2011
Other historians remember the French Revolution for the violence of the guillotine; Crease remembers it for the elegant precision of the metric system, born in the guillotine's shadow. Endorsed by Louis XVI in his last official act before imprisonment, this comprehensive measuring system marks the decisive modern turn in the long and complex history of human measurement. In retracing that history, Crease visits ancient Carthage, Han Dynasty China, and nineteenth-century West Africa. However, it is in revolutionary France where Crease finds intense passions inscribing kilograms, meters, and liters into political ideology. Careful research clarifies the surprising role of brutal British colonizers in spreading the French innovation around the globeexcept in the U.S., where politicians prove resistant to the French measuring system. Still, Crease hails American scientistsespecially Charles Peirce and Albert Michelsonamong the ingenious pioneers who have reformulated metric units in fundamental units wrested from atomic nuclei properties, manifestsd in wavelengths of light and impulses of electricity. Intellectual adventure doled out by the pound, kilogram, and metric ton.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)