The Values of Precision

by Wise, M. Norton

• ISBN13: 9780691016016
• ISBN10: 0691016011
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-03-17
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

The Values of Precisionexamines 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.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 3
Quantification, Precision, and Accuracy: Determinations of Population in the Ancien Regime	p. 17
A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in Francep39
"The Nicety of Experiment": Precision of Measurement and Precision of Reasoning in Late Eighteenth-Century Chemistry	p. 72
Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement
Traveling	p. 92
The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany	p. 103
Accurate Measurement Is an English Science	p. 135
Precision and Trust: Early Victorian Insurance and the Politics of Calculation	p. 173
The Images of Precision: Helmholtz and the Graphical Method in Physiology	p. 198
Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement
The Age of Steam and Telegraphy	p. 222
The Morals of Energy Metering: Constructing and Deconstructing the Precision of the Victorian Electrical Engineer's Ammeter and Voltmeter	p. 239
Precision Implemented: Henry Rowland, the Concave Diffraction Grating, and the Analysis of Light	p. 283
The Laboratory of Theory or What's Exact about the Exact Sciences?	p. 311
Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement
"Today Precision Must be Commonplace"	p. 352
Index	p. 363
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