by Andrew Robinson, Thames & Hudson. Hardback ISBN 9780500513675, £13.97 ($25.51).
Try to imagine civilization without measurement. In addition to length, weight, height, or any of the other obvious scalar quantities that we use in our daily lives, time and language also require standards to make sense. Current quantification includes concepts inconceivable to the earliest humans – gigabytes, body-mass index, radioactivity, and even beam intensity … Without accurate measurements our society would become chaos. On the other hand, some measurements are far from accurate, but still give a very clear idea of the described quantity: “a scourge of mosquitoes”, “a run of salmon,” or “a handful of children” are all something we can easily visualize.
The story of measurement by Andrew Robinson, former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement and the author of the bestselling The Story of Writing, consists of a series of chapters that can be read independently; it can also be read from cover to cover. However, by simply leaving the book on your coffee table you can enjoy it in silent moments in small doses every evening – and, I’m willing to wager, most of your guests will do the same, as they wait while coffee is being brewed.
Most people, perhaps with the exception of particle physicists who are used to aiming for “5σ detection” while doing their measurements, do not necessarily think about how measurements are going to be interpreted. Or maybe more subtle: who else is clear as to what accuracy means versus precision and error versus uncertainty? One chapter has been devoted to this interesting issue, and having originally trained as a survey engineer, this discussion brings back a lot of good memories for me.
The book has received mixed reviews, but it is not obvious which scale has been used for measuring the quality – after all it remains a coffee-table book and should be judged as such. I found it entertaining. Its potential popularity is also well reflected in that it exists in several language editions. Das Abenteuer der Vermessung and La storia della misurazione are already available in the bookshops. Read it yourself and make your own judgement, while, of course, applying all the rules that have to be taken into account for making a good measurement.
