Measuring the World Book

The Gene(ius) Pool

In the early 19th century Germany ruled the intellectual world. Or more accurately, given that Germany didn't yet exist, German was the globally dominant language of science, philosophy, and most other cultural pursuits. Measuring the World is a light-hearted docudrama of the intersecting life of two of the most important intellectual leaders of the period: The explorer and naturalist (and Prussian) Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematical prodigy Carl Friedrich Gauss (an Hanoverian). Together they transformed human understanding of both things and symbols, as well as the connection between things and symbols. That is to say, they created a new language.

The backgrounds of these two men show that genius is purely genetic. Humboldt was a member of a well-fed, well-educated, and well-connected elite. Gauss's mother, on the other hand, was illiterate and his father was a labourer. Humboldt survived a young brother who tried to kill him, and being raised by the servants. Gauss survived the persecution of jealous teachers and a social awkwardness verging on the autistic. Both thrived because they were recognised and rewarded by monarchical rulers as contributing to German culture. One wonders what their fates might have been in the competitive academic milieu of a modern pragmatic democracy.

Above all two traits/principles/character flaws unite these two men. First, for them everything is connected to everything else. Distinctions between areas of knowledge are not simply arbitrary, they are irrelevant. Both defy classification into a definite academic niche. They are quite simply interested in everything that is, a sort of openness which is astounding in its apparent lack of limits. If they had taken up painting, they would be considered today greater than Michelangelo (thus the power of visual advertising!)

Second, both shared a passion for numbers. Numbers are what brought reality closer. They reduced the gap between what Kant (yes, another German) had called the thing-in-itself and our perception of it. Measurement was philosophy in action. Increasing precision in measurement meant progress, an improvement in understanding that was demonstrable. Numbers, as the ancient Greeks suggested, provided a sort of divine view of the world. Numbers were fixed in their relations to each other, unlike natural language which was fuzzy and required less than perfect translation out of the mother-tongue into barbaric dialects like English and French.

What the two men did was to create a new cultural era. Measurement was a metaphor for hope. Kant's aporias didn't imply an intellectual dead end. And hadn't he put religion aside into a parallel world that seemed increasingly unnecessary? Numbers could improve the world not just describe it. Numbers formed the new foundation for human salvation. They were almost magical in their power to reveal and explain how the world came to be, to simplify its apparent complexity, and to predict its further development. Numbers were the future. Numbers touched reality:"At the base of physics were rules, at the base of rules there were laws, at the base of laws there were numbers; if one looked at them intently, one could recognize relationships between them, repulsions or attractions."

The patterns revealed by numbers allowed the telling of stories which had never been told before. Stories of intense heat in the Earth, of antiquities older than ever before dreamed of, stories of parallel lines that meet, of bizarre celestial phenomena. The language of numbers wasn't just more reliable than any other language, it was bigger. It permitted discussion of things no other languages knew about. It pointed to things that were hidden in normal speech. It resolved paradoxes and suggested previously unthought possibilities.

The world got used to being measured. The web of numbers imposed itself upon the world so thoroughly that it was taken as the world. This is what all languages do, and perhaps the language of numbers best of all. Human beings engage in this fantasy of language as reality in order to maintain hope or, more generally, to stay sane. Faith in measurement is even more intense than faith in God. As it turns out the object of the two faiths is exactly the same: language. Language is our fundamental technology and we worship it. Today, we have a new language - digital electronics - in which we have as deep a faith as Humboldt and Gauss had in theirs. Genius, it seems, even exceptional German genius is not immune to the temptation of idolatry.