"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.
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