💡
"Numbers, which the left hemisphere feels familiar with and is excellent at manipulating . . .". McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 430.
"We take the measure of the world and ourselves a hundred times a day, with rulers and kitchen thermometers and bathroom scales and, everywhere, clocks. Scientists have honed our capacity to measure to unimaginable degrees of precision, and the entire span of the globe has been plotted to within a hair’s breadth, tracked by satellites which coordinate their movements by subatomically verified timekeeping.
"Behind all this is a basic surety: a meter is a meter the world over, a gram as good a gram in Bombay as in Paris. Even the idiosyncratic units customarily used in the United States are, now, defined in reference to these universal standards. The enlightenment dream of measurements “for all times and for all peoples” has been realized—or at least worked out to the kinds of decimal places that only specialists worry about.
"These universal standards are the product of generations of creative problem-solving on the part of European scientists and engineers, and it is these efforts to bring order out of the uncertainty of nature and the variety of custom that James Vincent ably relates in Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants (Norton, pp. 432, $32.50). Vincent brings out the characters of enlightenment science and tells the story of how they were able to develop the instruments and techniques which ensure our assessments of the world around us are precise, replicable, and universal." Christopher McCaffery, writing in Issue 19 of The Lamp magazine.
The left hemisphere likes to measure . . . it needs to measure. it is task-oriented. If it must accomplish X or Y, it needs to calculate the requisite effort by counting the units or weighing the pounds.
