Measure for Measure can be bought at Amazon and at used bookstores online and in the real world.

Measure for Measure

Simon and Schuster, 1994

Measure for Measure tells the history of science from a deeply unusual point of view, using the stories of seven scientific and musical instruments to explore the critical ways of thinking that drove classical science, and then powered its transformation into the modern system of finding things out we depend on now.

The work begins by exploring the pipe organ, invented by the Greeks. That machine was built with the most advanced technical and scientific knowledge of its day, and was then used as a symbol of that advancement, roughly similar to the significance of the space race as an engine of national pride and competition.  The stories of other instruments follow:  the microscope; the alchemists’ still and the chemists’ scales; the cello, numerical models; digital musical instruments, from the player piano to the computer-driven synthesizer, and more.  The book turns on an underappreciated fact of scientific (and musical) life:  you can only ask the questions, or create the sounds, that your instruments permit.  What anyone at any time builds and how they might use the result thus reveals a great deal about what they’re thinking about; what they see as important; and what happens when something happens that they did not expect, when they make a discovery.

Praise

The book was enormous fun to write, bringing me across enormous reaches of history and ideas and the ways different people living in very different places and times made their way through their days.  Its readers felt rewarded:  best selling astronomy writer Timothy Ferris called it “a vivid and telling read,” while Stephen S. Hall writing in The Washington Post saw it as “a lovely and provocative meditation on the nature of knowledge.”  In the Los Angeles Times Book Review novelist Richard Powers praise the way “large and small connections…emerge, prolific, bracing, and metaphorically resonant,” and in The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor simply concluded that the book was “lucid, civilized and enlightening.”

Purchase

Measure for Measure can be bought at Amazon and at used bookstores online and in the real world.