World in the Balance

A nice, short pop-sci/pop-history book about the history of the SI units, the metric system, and how humanity's systems of weights and measures have evolved alongside their material conditions.
I needed a breather after giving up on my 24 hour audiobook about the history of Cuba. something lighter and less riddled with colonialism.

And yes I do mean “less riddled with colonialism,” but not “without colonialism”, as forcing developing nations to adopt the weights and measures of the colonizers did have a (in my broken brain, insufficient) roll in the adoption of the metric system.

I think if Joseph Dombey had made it to the U.S. in the mid-1790s to share the early metric system, at the request of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the US wouldn't be the last holdout. But alas his ship went off course and pirates got to him first.

It's fascinating how since then the anti-metric weirdos in the US kept morphing their opinions to fit the times. In the 1800's they said the metric system was godless. In the early 1900's they said it was as irrational as the evolution deniers.

The stupid ASME also helped halt the transition. Never trusted mechanical engineers...now I know why....

I was fascinating hearing about the history of weights and measures, the creation of the metric system, the slow evolution to the SI standard, and the eventual elimination of the “prototype meter” to a scientifically measured value rather than a real-world object. The book talks about the replacement of the “prototype kilogram” to either the big silicon crystal ball or the calculated value by fixing Planck's constant. But it was published before either of those decisions were made. Now both the €2 billion ball is built and h is fixed. So we don't have any real-world objects to base any of our measurements on.

The last few chapters got a little weird, talking about the “modern meteoscape” or the phenomenology of measurement. It's about how to tools of measurement impact our own philosophy of measurement. I don't think it would have been a far step to rephrase the author's final point to be about how the material conditions of our modern existence impacts our ideologies.

Also one of the last chapters was about the complexities of measuring women's breasts for the proper fitting of a brazier. Interesting stuff but sorta out of left field when before it was all about “and then in 19 dickity 2 the international consortium of old white guys decided that the blah blah constant will be adjusted by one one-millionth in order to eliminate the need of this fancy metal stick” etc.
I liked it. Check it out of you're into that sort of stuff.