A World of Artifice

This chapter discusses how measurement activities were central in forming some of the most basic ideas of the physical sciences. It should be observed that this infatuation with measuring led to the neutralization of concepts as well as their creation. Temperature had less human meaning after the experimental physicists laid hold of it. In the natural sciences, Ernst Mach's positivism was especially influential among experimenters. The resonance of the positivist mania for quantification with vast social ambitions for science is exemplified best of all by the career of Karl Pearson. From the early 1890s until his death more than forty years later, Pearson harnessed his prodigious talents to the development of a statistical method and its application to biological and social questions. The chapter then considers the standardization of measurements.