The philosophical value of World in the Balance [WB] lies as much in Crease's explanation of what the book is not, as in its being the book it is. What it is, of course, is a history of the world's search for perfect measurement. The tale starts with ancient practices using improvised body standards (e.g., foot, span, pinch) and culturally significant artifacts (e.g., the court-regulated musical pitch of flutes and bells in imperial China, elaborate brass castings in West Africa's Akan culture, endlessly proliferating local devices in the feudal French countryside), and it culminates in today's "single, universal network that relates many different kinds of measurements...to absolute standards" (p. 269). The metrology story is anything but prosaic. It involves just as many wild tales, weird practices, and strange characters as the history of any other human activity. One of my favorites is the mid-1800s attempt to promote the dimensions of Great Pyramid of Giza as divinely inspired standards that could ward off the evils of the metric system (pp. 151-59).
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