Beyond Measure Quotes

“To measure is to choose; to focus your attention on a single attribute and exclude all others.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it,’ said Thomson, ‘but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of Science.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“It’s confidence in generations to come that is the focus of the Esquisse, with Condorcet making an impassioned plea for a concept that is now commonplace: a belief in the accumulative virtue of humanity – that the world is growing in wisdom, and that life tomorrow will be better than it is today. In other words: a belief in Progress. As Condorcet writes: ‘The time will therefore come when the sun shines only on free human beings who recognise no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their benighted or hypocritical minions exist only in the history books and the theatre, and our only concern with them is to pity their victims and their dupes, maintain a useful vigilance motivated by horror at their excesses, and know how to recognise and stifle, by the weight of reason, the first seeds of superstition and tyranny that ever dare to reappear.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“Measurement has become such a powerful symbol of justice that it can represent your moral deeds in life as well as your spiritual rewards and punishment. It’s perhaps due to this symbolic potency that the Bible mentions measurement more often than it does charity.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn’t exist as common units. (The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians, who used a base-60, or sexagecimal, system of counting for their astronomy. The ancient Greeks later adopted this and divided circular astronomical maps into 360 divisions, which were later transposed on to clock faces.)”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants