54 Philosophy Now ●^ August/September 2019I
n his book The First Three Minutes
(1977), physicist Stephen Weinberg
famously proclaimed that “the more
the universe seems comprehensible,
the more it also seems pointless.” The
advance of science, it appears, results in what
the sociologist Max Weber, echoing
Friedrich Schiller, poignantly characterized
as ‘the disenchantment of the world’.
For Weinberg, it is worth noting, ‘the
universe’ is the physical world, and the phys-
ical world is the world of physics. Given that
physics advances by setting aside purpose,
meaning, value, not to speak of secondary
qualities such as colour or sound and the
viewpoints of subjects, his conclusion is
entirely unsurprising. But it does provide an
opportunity to remind ourselves of the
remarkable, and, I would submit, enchant-
ing path that has led to Weinberg’s terminal
disenchantment. The crucial step on that
path is the invention of measurement, some-
thing which we take too much for granted.Stripping Away The Subject
The centrality of measurement to science
was proclaimed by the great nineteenth
century physicist Lord Kelvin:“When you can measure what you are
speaking about, and express it in numbers,
you know something about it; when you
cannot express it in numbers, your knowl-
edge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind;
it may be the beginning of knowledge, but
you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced
to the stage of science.” (Lecture, 1883)Measurement liberates us from our indi-
vidual, idiosyncratic judgements. In measur-
ing we endeavour to get ourselves out of the
way so that the world out there can speak for
itself. We may validly disagree whether a
vase is beautiful; but if you and I disagree as
to whether it is six or seven inches high, then
at least one of us is wrong.
Because measurement is ubiquitous in
science – and, in a world where science is the
dominant cultural fact, also in our everydaylife – it’s hard to see just how strange it is
that we are able to dismount from the flow
of ordinary unsolicited experience to make
a space for disciplined, quality-controlled
active observations. What’s more, only a
small part of what is experienced during the
course of any measurement counts as the
measurement. My experiences of the labo-
ratory in which the measurement is made,
what I am feeling, my reasons for making
the measurement, and so on, are irrelevant.
Equally irrelevant are the exact appearance
of the measuring tool, and all but one
parameter of the object that is being
measured. The overwhelming majority of
the experienced properties of the ruler, for
example, and of the measured object are
incidental and excluded from the result. As
for the result, it doesn’t matter whether it’s
recorded in black or blue ink or pencil, or as
a number or dot on a screen. A measure-
ment, in short, extracts from a complex situ-
ation with at least three elements (person,
measuring tool, measured object) an item of
supreme simplicity: a number attached to a
unit. Everything else has been stripped off.
The idea of a datapoint, featureless and
vanishingly small, takes the stripped-down
nature of the measurement to a limit.
Consequently, neither the number nor the
unit tells us much about the object. If I say
of something that it is twenty-four inches,
you would not be able to attach any meaning
or significance to that statement, not even
whether it was long or short, unless you
already knew what the object was – a cater-
pillar or a tree.
The use of units to express results is the
most obvious marker of the special nature of
measurement and its distance from ordinary
experience. Inches and pounds do not exist
in nature: they are imported from the
further reaches of a form of discourse made
possible by the shared experiences of many
thousands of individuals, most of whom will
be unknown to those making the measure-
ment. This is a reminder of how far ‘results’
are from the unregulated flow of moment-
to-moment experience. When we cooper-ate to measure something, it is not compa-
rable to looking at something together.
Indeed, each of us might have quite differ-
ent experiences of the act of measurement
and of what is measured, but those differ-
ences are not (or should not be) of any
importance. It will be evident that whether
it involves several thousands of people in the
hunt for the Higg’s Boson, or two people
holding a tape to measure the size of a room,
measurement requires shared conscious-
ness of a kind quite different from that seen
elsewhere in the animal kingdom.The Transformation of Experience
To get a clearer idea of the extraordinary
nature of the journey from the pell-mell of
experience towards measurement and
thence to quantitative science, it helps to
think about the most primitive units. They
depend upon a curious transformation of
our relationship to our own bodies, in which
we see our bodies as a source of standardized
units, or at least of the idea of such units.
The use of forearms (for a cubit), hands (a
span), thumbs (an inch), and ‘feet’, as
measures of length, is an egregious instru-
mentalization of the flesh of which we are
made. When our ancestors deployed a
measure based on their forearms to quantify
the length of a building in cubits, bit of their
bodies were reduced to objects that were
further reduced to lengths. As ‘a cubit’, my
forearm loses the privileged standing it has
in my own life of being an intrinsic part of
me, and becomes any(one’s) forearm. And
this democratization is taken further. The
forearm is downgraded to an object onto-
logically on a par with the very objects
whose lengths it is used to measure: it is a
mere object among other objects. (The
compliment is returned much later when a
measuring tape, an item whose role is
simply to be its own length, is applied to the
forearm to determine its size.)
Measurement is a vital step in the process
of getting ourselves out of the way en route
to objective science. The result, the ‘read-
ing’, is stripped of the qualitative aspects ofIn Measure
Began Our Might
Raymond Tallis takes the measure of measurement.
T
allis
in
Wonderland