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The relation between evidence and units of measurement is a fraught one. In the lab and in the field, evidence is captured through particular units – without units there is no scientific evidence. In addition, units underpin the practices and technologies of measurement. Such units as volts, metres, celsius, grams, joules, newtons, seconds and so on and so forth are standardised, calibrated and embodied in the very devices that gather evidence (whatever the unit those devices are designed ultimately to measure). Of course, here we are referring to ‘objective measurements’, even if such objectivity is necessarily contingent (subject to situational circumstances). And such contingency even applies to units themselves: the work of standardisation of units is hard, an unceasing and circuitous calibration of standard particulars (O’Connell, 1993). This is not to dilute the value of these units but to embrace critically the ingenuity with which standardised units are sustained. Such embrace is critical because units are not innocently objective. Objectivity is an accomplishment (not least helped along by the fact that units are indissolubly tied to number and quantification – Porter, 1995). The history of metrology (the study of measurement in a variety of fields) is nothing if not a history of political as well as material struggles (Schaffer, 1997; Crease, 2010). For certain units to be established as the universal standards, other units (and the institutional and national interests that are attached to them) had to be displaced. Moreover, units from different disciplines routinely compete with one another: under what conditions does the toxicologists’ parts per million achieve greater evidential credibility than epidemiologists’ deaths per million (and vice versa)?
But the relation of units to evidence is not the preserve of scientific institutions. It is also present in popular and popularizing culture. For instance, the nanometres by which nanotechnology is measured are typically translated into a fraction of the width of a human hair. I recall a conference presentation by a graphic designer who, in attempting to make large volumes more graspable, represented cubic metres of CO2 emissions in terms of strikingly depicted ‘housefuls’. On the surface, this might appear to be an exercise in scientific popularization, that is, in helping non-specialists visualize particular phenomena. But these units are not innocent either: What human? What hair? What sort of house? In some cases, popular units can appear celebratory: the length of the London fatbergs was reported in the UK press in multiples of the London red bus, or proportional to Tower Bridges. These units at once evoke a sense of London pride in both the fatbergs (at the time the largest in the world) and Londoners’ collective sense of irony; however, they also serve in the mediation of a de-politicised version of a London devoid of difference (Michael, 2020). In this example, we glimpse how units also play a cultural and ethical role.
Reproduced with the permission of the artist
Let us consider the UK’s recently replaced 2 metre social distancing rule for COVID-19. This served as a ‘unit of safety’, though the evidence behind it was never very clear. Indeed, a recent review suggests it is based on a range of contentious parameters (see Qureshi et al., 2020) which suggest, if anything, that this distancing be continued, and even extended under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, arguably, for a while it served as a sort of moral unit – to keep 2 metres distance was evidence of responsible behaviour. And to make sure that this unit was embedded in the body social, 2 metres had to be popularized, visualised through accessible imagery. Thus, the BBC (2020) represented 2 metres as the length of two shopping trolleys, or the length of a bed, or the length of broom held out in outstretched arms by a woman, but also the length of a very tall sportsman (3 sportsmen and a Bond villain, to be precise). These re-visualised, popular units are suggestive of something more than just safety. They bifurcate along stereotypical gender lines – feminised domesticity and safeguarding of the domestic space versus masulinised strength with the power to ‘fight the war’ against the virus. But alongside this, these folk units, as with the representations of the fatberg, enact a collective sense of irony. If irony entails a second (or third or fourth…) meaning beneath the surface signification, what might this be? In P. Murt’s cartoon there is a beautifully ironic juxtaposition of the technical definition of a metre to a series of the more or less impracticable evidencing of the 2 metre rule. At minimum, we might say that the irony is that units, however formally refined and rigorous they are, are always in need of operationalisation which itself involves all sorts of potentially compromised practices that nonetheless might ‘work’.
Mike Michael
References
BBC (2020). How to keep 2m social distancing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-52054844/coronavirus-social-distancing-advice-what-two-metres-looks-like
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