Quantitative thinking
Posted on:: February 18th, 2004
There are interesting facts and ideas at this intro to Alfred Crosby’s The Measure of Reality. For example, did you know:
Because Europe did not straddle the equator, and because old traditions dictated twelve hours for each day and each night, Europeans developed a system of unequal “accordion-pleated hours that puffed up and deflated” so as to ensure a dozen hours for each daytime and each nighttime, winter and summer.
Talking glibly of the trees and the forest as we do, we still seldom realize how rarely we catch a glimpse of the latter.
“Western Europe was a warren of competing jurisdictions; no authority had effective political, religious, or intellectual control.”
One reason for that (there are certainly others), is that a great deal of Western Europe is a maze of glacial valleys, whose floors were once filled with braided streams carrying summer meltwater floods. Now, the silt that choked them has become fertile soil carrying much smaller and more manageable streams, forming landlocked islands, each of them ideal for a fiefdom, a duchy or a canton.
Ok, so, concrete quantification was an emergent intellectual advancement. One sentance says it all. What’s the next stage?
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