If I had noticed that this is the #1 best selling book in the science measurement category I might not have bought it. That is one oversight I am extremely grateful for, however. This is a very good book that is sure to surprise you and you do not have to be an engineer or a scientist to appreciate it.
Winchester is a modern polymath with a high level of curiosity, both scientific and philosophical. And that’s why he may be the only person with the expertise to have written this book.
The author catalogues the advancement of technology from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution. (This is definitely NOT another book about the disruptors of Silicon Valley.) His examples are easy to follow and very informative. Except for the founders of Intel, he spends most of his time on inventers and engineers you probably haven’t heard of.
And it works because in the end this is not so much a book about technology as it is a book about precision. Accuracy allows us to make nice things that last, but technological and scientific advancement require precision in both dimension and location. Engineering, in fact, outstripped precision quite early in the Industrial Age until people like John Wilkinson, Joseph Bramah, and Henry Maudslay came along and saw the problem.
Philosophy enters the picture when Winchester notes the obvious duality between science and nature. Science requires precision. Nature abhors it. “For might there be in the wider world, in truth, simply too much precision? Might today’s singular devotion to mechanical exactitude be clouding a valued but very different component of the human condition, one that, as a result, is being allowed to vanish?”
Precision allows computation. Imprecision, however, requires thought. Binary processors are very precise. Books, written in the human construct of language, are not. And that’s why I think it’s a shame that many people today are reading less. Computation without thought is not progress.
Can we not also assume that precision takes money? The great scientific computers of today require the accuracy of atomic clocks rather than the simple quartz watch that most of us get by with. The meter wasn’t precise enough for the International Astronomical Union so they developed the Angstrom, a length equal to one ten-billionth of a meter, defined by the spectral wavelength emitted by heated cadmium.
And who is going to pay for all of that precision? And what do we do with the people who don’t have access to it? Everything, including precision and technology, exists in context. We cannot blindly pursue the latter without understanding the implications for our social, educational, and economic institutions and systems.
If we ignore it, nature will win. “Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.”
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