sensation, and moreover, does not rely on
particular accidents of experience. For these
reasons it is particularly amenable to sharing
with, and corroboration by, others. You do
not have to have replicate my experiences in
order for both of us to arrive at the conclu-
sion that the object we have been measuring
is ten feet high.
This applies with even more force when
what is in question is not a single time-depen-
dent data point but a timeless impersonal
fact, such as that Manchester is 200 miles
from London, the Moon is 250,000 miles
from Earth, or the Sun is 4,000,000,000 years
old. The data which form the staple of
science and underpin its laws and principles,
not to speak of the wall-to-wall technology
that is based on them, are even more obvi-
ously independent of individuals and their
personal history. They belong to no-one, and
float freely of all bodies.
Nothing could more clearly demonstrate
the falsity of the claim by the otherwise bril-
liant nineteenth century physicist and
philosopher Ernst Mach that “there is no
break in continuity between science... and
modes of behaviour characteristic of the
entire animal world.” On the contrary,
dismounting from the flow of experience to
seek out a particular experience remote
from appetites is hardly the way of the beast.
Measurement, a voluntary interruption in
the spontaneous flow of experience that has
vastly extended our power to predict and
control the material world, is a manifestation
of our individual and collective unwiring
from nature and a driver to further unwiring.
This unwiring is the reward for the increas-
ingly active nature of our perceptual engage-
ment with the world, as we move from
gawping to scrutinizing and thence to
making quantitative observations. Measure-
ments which do not merely happen but are
made, often building on the efforts of others,
are a long way from passive bedazzlement by
sensory experiences.Beyond the Rule of the Physical
The claim by W.B. Yeats in his poem ‘Under
Ben Bulben’ (1933) that ‘measurement began
our might’ is not entirely true. Our might has
deeper roots than measurement. Yeats does,
however, capture an important truth.
Through measurement, our capacity to
confront and act upon the natural world
from a distance is vastly enhanced. Our
collective facing of the world is supported by
a gaze not localized in an individual body –
and hence not vulnerable to its vicissitudes.
This gaze looks at a world beyond the hori-
zon that encircles biological vision, at a
realm of knowledge, of facts, of possibilities,
and ultimately of quantitative laws and equa-
tions. The out-of-body experiences of Man
the Measuring Animal place him beyond the
limits imposed by the biology of the human
organism, and even outside of nature.
With this we come to the most astonish-
ing truth about measurement. Although it is
the lifeblood of physics, measurement does not
fit into the world seen through the eyes of physics.
Don’t take my word for it. It was Albert
Einstein no less who in his Autobiographical
Notes reported that he was“struck by the fact that the theory [relativi-
ty]... introduces two kinds of physical
things, i.e. (1) measuring rods and clocks,
and (2) all other things, e.g., the electromag-
netic field, the material point, etc. This, in a
certain sense, is inconsistent... strictly
speaking, measuring rods and clocks would
have to be represented as solutions of the
basic equations (objects consisting of mov-ing atomic configurations) not, as it were,
theoretically self-sufficient entities.”But they are, irreducibly, theoretically self-
sufficient entities, because they are insepara-
ble from human beings with their points of
view, who provide those frames of reference
that are necessary for measurements.
Quantitative measurements cannot be
accommodated in the world-picture of natu-
ral science which rests on them. If, as physi-
cists would have it, the most faithful portrait
of the universe really were that it was a
‘system of magnitudes’, there would be no
place for the elucidation of those magni-
tudes. The expectation of Mach, whose
philosophy inspired the young Einstein,
“That the foundations of science as a whole,
and of physics in particular, await their next
greatest elucidations from the side of biol-
ogy, and especially from the analysis of
sensations” seems a forlorn hope.
So there we have it: measurement under-
pins a world picture that seems to support
naturalism; naturalism, however, cannot
support measurement. This takes us back to
the fundamental fact that natural science
cannot make sense of the human conscious-
ness upon which it depends. It cannot, there-
fore, explain how it is possible that, while all
entities are in time and have length, there
have emerged creatures who tellthe time and
measuretheir length. In doing so, they express
a unique human capacity to get themselves
out of the way by privileging shared, quality-
controlled observations over immediate
experience. Most striking among the many
things science cannot accommodate, is the
existence of a scientific world picture.
Some of the meaning that’s lost as science
progresses is recovered when we reflect on
the capacity of science to further one version
of the comprehensibility of the universe.
Reminding ourselves of the scientific path to
disenchantment may re-enchant the world.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2019
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Logos: The
Mystery of How We Make Sense of the
World has recently been published by Agenda.T
allis
in
Wonderland
August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 55