Perhaps one fair way to judge the situation is with Peirce’s philosophy of pragmatism, which he once suggested was only a restating of Jesus’s wisdom: ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits.’45 In this case, the fruits of modern measurement are the fruits of the modern world, for better or for worse. In Versailles, the vote in the auditorium is approved, as everyone expected, and the official definition of the kilogram is changed the following year. As the metrologists hoped, nobody who missed the news noticed. Theirs is an invisible discipline, their work hidden from the public view, tucked away
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