Response

摘要

Measurement is an emblematic technology: it is ubiquitous, was the outcome of an extensive and ongoing historical development, appears to be neutral even as it transforms our experience of the world, withdraws into the background, and is noticed primarily when it breaks down. But as I tried to show in World in the Balance, measurement is also an extraordinary technology. It does not involve only specific artifacts such as rulers, scales, and other instruments; nor artifact complexes such as those of the International System of Units, or SI; nor even ensembles of actors and artifacts such as those at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the institution that manages the SI. Measurement is a fluid and correlated network that is smoothly and intimately integrated into the world and its shape.