## Metadata - Author: [[Emanuele Lugli]] - Full Title: The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness - Category: #books ## Highlights - This book, as I mentioned, foregrounds the interdependence of measurements and power. Such a coupling is uncommon. Because measurements stand at the very foundation of objectivity and truth, they are considered to be neutral. ([Location 194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07RXSQ6HC&location=194)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This book presents measuring not as an operation that merely determines the quantity of something out there, but as a formal activity that creates rather than certifies. ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07RXSQ6HC&location=221)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In his aspirational speech to the French Parliament about the need for a new standard, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand asked his audience to “interrogate nature.”1 And it is through nature that the 1793 report from the Commission des poids et mesures justified the creation of the new set of measurement units. The meter, it reads, “has been taken from nature, it has deduced from the dimensions of the earth itself so that it will always be possible to find it again and reestablish it in case it went lost or was altered.” ([Location 654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07RXSQ6HC&location=654)) - Scientists defined their decimal division as natural, since men do not have twelve fingers.4 (Such reasoning had a strong appeal after Étienne de Condillac argued in his popular Traité des sensations (1754) that it was through touching and handling that men truthfully engaged in the real.) ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07RXSQ6HC&location=661)) - Tags: [[blue]]