Beyond Measure: the Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent

Author:James Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet applied numerical techniques borrowed from astronomers to new indices of data, including the human body

In our time, the concept of the average is most likely to be seen as an insult, as an indictment of mediocrity. But for Quetelet, to be average was to be perfect. He saw the average statistics in his biometric data as the proper outcome of natural laws; an indication that the subject was free of all abnormality. The average man, he wrote, exists ‘in a just state of equilibrium, in a perfect harmony, equally distant from excesses and defects of every kind, in such a way that . . . one must consider him as the type of all that is beautiful and all that is good’.24 As Hacking notes, Quetelet’s achievement in Sur l’homme and his subsequent works is a subtle but significant transformation of what statistical measures mean.25 When the normal distribution was applied in astronomy, the average reading was not necessarily taken to be the real value, but a best approximation accounting for random error. Quetelet, however, transformed this mathematical shorthand into a ‘real quality’ – something that was true of the groups of humans he studied. It is an ontological reordering that turns abstract measure into something tangible, and while the result is not necessarily false, it is definitely constructed, and therefore fallible.

Quetelet’s work was received with fascination and acclaim. A three-part review in London’s Athenaeum concluded: ‘We consider the appearance of these volumes as forming an epoch in the literary history of civilization.’26 His work triggered a statistical feeding frenzy among the professional classes, with societies, journals, and institutions devoted to the discipline springing up across Europe. Members collected and published data of increasingly dubious relevance, with one resourceful acolyte siphoning off the contents of the toilets in a busy train station to attempt to deduce the ‘average European urine’.27 And Quetelet’s own work began to expand in scope too, as he looked beyond the dimensions of the human body to the wider patterns of societal data. Here he distinguished himself not as a mathematician but as a miner of quantitative ore, delving into government publications and scientific journals to find data to work with. He collected statistics on crime and suicide rates, on marriages, births, and disease, and cross-referenced his findings by age, sex, occupation, and place of residence.

The more Quetelet collected, the more he discovered shocking regularity in society’s workings. Even the most passionate activities – marriage and murder, for example – seemed to barely differ year by year in many countries. The results disturbed and excited him in equal measure. In one analysis of Parisian police statistics, he notes ‘the terrifying exactitude with which crimes reproduce themselves’ – not just in the number of murders each year but in the proportion of stabbings to shootings to strangulations. ‘We know in advance how many individuals will dirty their hands with the blood of others, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, nearly as well as one can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that must take place,’ he wrote.

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