The values of precision

de M. Norton Wise

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 enterpriseswith their requirements for standardization and mass productionhave been the major promoters of numerical precision. Scientists and engineers, pursuing their own interests in the virtues of precision for knowledge of nature and for technological control, have taken advantage of the resources available, thus entering a symbiotic relationship with state and industry that promotes ever more 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.