Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

by James Vincent

The only thing that produces reliable data, he thought, was experiment and observation. For although Peirce was at home in the abstractions of logic and mathematics, he was adamant that truth was something produced with the hands and the eyes. He praised scientists like Lavoisier, who, in disproving the existence of phlogiston through careful measurement, had turned scales and alembics into ‘instruments of thought’. In doing so, Lavoisier created a ‘new conception of reasoning as something which was to be done with one’s eyes open, by manipulating real things instead of words and fancies’, said Peirce.30 Notably, he also stressed that such work only succeeds if verified by others. ‘[O]ne man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone,’ he wrote. ‘If he sees what others cannot see, we call it a hallucination.’ It was only by working as part of a group, by collating and comparing results, that one is able to ‘grind off the arbitrary and the individualistic character of thought’.