Measuring civilisation

The story of humans measuring things is no less than the story of civilisation - a claim that sounds like irritating hyperbole but in this case turns out to be true

BEYOND MEASURE: The Hidden History of Measurement From Cubits to Quantum Constants

Author: James Vincent

Publisher: W W Norton

Pages: 423

Price: $32.50

Reading James Vincent’s quietly thrilling new book, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement From Cubits to Quantum Constants, I began to think that one measure (so to speak) of the human experience might be the number of things we take for granted. Rulers and scales and clocks: These are mundane appliances of daily life, obvious and uncontroversial to the point of banality.

But wait! Vincent, a London-based science writer for The Verge, shows how wrong this assumption is. The story of humans