The Values of Precision

by M. Norton Wise

Overview

The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states—with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies—and large-scale commercial enterprises—with their requirements for standardization and mass production—have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn has led to increasingly refined measures in ever-widening domains of the natural and social world. At the heart of this book, therefore, is an inquiry into the capacity of numbers and instruments to travel across boundaries of culture and materials.


Many of the papers focus attention on disagreements about the significance and the credibility of particular sorts of measurements deployed to support particular claims, as in the measures of the population of France, the electrical resistance of copper, or the solvency of insurance companies. At the same time they display the deeply cultural character of precision values. Contributors to the volume include Ken Alder, Graeme J. N. Gooday, Jan Golinski, Frederic L. Holmes, Kathryn M. Olesko, Theodore M. Porter, Andrea Rusnock, Simon Schaffer, George Sweetnam, Andrew Warwick, and M. Norton Wise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691016016
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/06/1997
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

M. Norton Wise is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies for the Program in History of Science, Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction	3
1	Quantification, Precision, and Accuracy: Determinations of Population in the Ancien Regime	17
2	A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in France	39
3	"The Nicety of Experiment": Precision of Measurement and Precision of Reasoning in Late Eighteenth-Century Chemistry	72
4	Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part I - Traveling	92
5	The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany	103
6	Accurate Measurement Is an English Science	135
7	Precision and Trust: Early Victorian Insurance and the Politics of Calculation	173
8	The Images of Precision: Helmholtz and the Graphical Method in Physiology	198
9	Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part II - The Age of Steam and Telegraphy	222
10	The Morals of Energy Metering: Constructing and Deconstructing the Precision of the Victorian Electrical Engineer's Ammeter and Voltmeter	239
11	Precision Implemented: Henry Rowland, the Concave Diffraction Grating, and the Analysis of Light	283
12	The Laboratory of Theory or What's Exact about the Exact Sciences?	311
13	Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part III - "Today Precision Must be Commonplace"	352
Index	363

Editorial Reviews

"Standardization and precision measurement have often been taken for granted by historians of science. Norton Wise should therefore be applauded for having put together this excellent collection of essays that places the topic . . . at the center of historical attention."—-Sven Widmalm, Science

"Sheds new light on and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the sometimes surprising results of mathematicization."—-Dennis H. Rouvray, Endeavour

"[A] pleasure to read, and it reveals much about quantification, the trustworthiness of numbers, the role of the professions, and the relations between science and technology. . . ."—-Mary S. Morgan, Economic History Review

"Taken singly, each of the essays is of unusually high quality; taken together, they are the best introduction available in English to the diverse practices, applications, and morals of precision."—-Lorraine Daston, Isis

From the Publisher

Taken singly, each of the essays is of unusually high quality; taken together, they are the best introduction available in English to the diverse practices, applications, and morals of precision.

Isis - Lorraine Daston

[A] pleasure to read, and it reveals much about quantification, the trustworthiness of numbers, the role of the professions, and the relations between science and technology. . . .

Economic History Review - Mary S. Morgan

Sheds new light on and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the sometimes surprising results of mathematicization.

Endeavour - Dennis H. Rouvray

Standardization and precision measurement have often been taken for granted by historians of science. Norton Wise should therefore be applauded for having put together this excellent collection of essays that places the topic . . . at the center of historical attention.

Science - Sven Widmalm

Taken singly, each of the essays is of unusually high quality; taken together, they are the best introduction available in English to the diverse practices, applications, and morals of precision.
— Lorraine Daston

Isis

[A] pleasure to read, and it reveals much about quantification, the trustworthiness of numbers, the role of the professions, and the relations between science and technology. . . .
— Mary S. Morgan

Economic History Review

Sheds new light on and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the sometimes surprising results of mathematicization.
— Dennis H. Rouvray

Endeavour

Standardization and precision measurement have often been taken for granted by historians of science. Norton Wise should therefore be applauded for having put together this excellent collection of essays that places the topic . . . at the center of historical attention.
— Sven Widmalm

Science

". . . explores how the concept of precision emerged and came to be valued in Western culture. . . . What is clear from this book is that the perceived value of precision lies as much with how it is attained, and by whom, as with the degree of precision itself."

New Scientist

". . . explores how the concept of precision emerged and came to be valued in Western culture. . . . What is clear from this book is that the perceived value of precision lies as much with how it is attained, and by whom, as with the degree of precision itself."

New Scientist