James Vincent > Quotes

“To measure is to choose; to focus your attention on a single attribute and exclude all others.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it,’ said Thomson, ‘but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of Science.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

“It’s confidence in generations to come that is the focus of the Esquisse, with Condorcet making an impassioned plea for a concept that is now commonplace: a belief in the accumulative virtue of humanity – that the world is growing in wisdom, and that life tomorrow will be better than it is today. In other words: a belief in Progress. As Condorcet writes: ‘The time will therefore come when the sun shines only on free human beings who recognise no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their benighted or hypocritical minions exist only in the history books and the theatre, and our only concern with them is to pity their victims and their dupes, maintain a useful vigilance motivated by horror at their excesses, and know how to recognise and stifle, by the weight of reason, the first seeds of superstition and tyranny that ever dare to reappear.”
― James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants