Do you remember high school?
I don’t mean where or when you went to the grey cluster of buildings in which grown-ups tried to impress upon you how big and important things in your life would soon be. I mean, do you really recall the experience?
It’s always mind-blowing to me when I return to the grounds of my old high school.
Not only because it’s been purchased by Curro and scrubbed clean of anything resembling the place where I pretended to care about learning, but actually cared about music and girls.
But also, because it seems so … small. It’s like someone went around and removed a few centimetres from the height and width of everything.
This place, whose boundaries seemed to at once constrict you and yet also encompassed your whole world, is such a small part of it now.
And, for me, an even weirder part of the experience is meeting your old teachers out “in the wild”, so to speak. It’s very weird that these people, who were once titans of fear and respect, are now just, like, you know, people. Normal people with normal struggles, trying to muddle through life as best they can. Just like the rest of us.
I remember running into a former English teacher at a wedding, not recognising her and thinking she was a cougar flirting with my friend before realising they were catching up on old times.
I remember giving the middle finger to a former accountancy teacher in traffic, then trying to hide in the confined space of my tiny car when I realised who she was.
I remember sitting at a dinner table with a former biology teacher, as she gave me a frank and enlightening discourse on the struggles of being a parent, before I had become one myself.
And I remember running into a school secretary in a pharmacy queue, in an entirely different city, and willing my brain not to explode as she made small talk with me as a fellow adult.
I guess all of this was because I was no longer a 15-year-old idiot, dithering through the corridors and trying to take 25 minutes to go to the bathroom to avoid having to go back to class. I was, in fact, now a peer.
Will wonders never cease?
It is, in some ways, very reassuring to know that this place and these people, who once wielded outsize influence in your life and the lives of all your friends, are just normal, run-of-the-mill places and people.
The most daunting parts of high school are often constructed in our minds.
I mention all of this because Piero Martin’s fascinating book The Seven Measures of the World brought to mind a high school textbook, but in the best possible way. Let me explain:
In this book, Martin is attempting to impart a frankly enormous amount of information about a specific topic. In this case, the topic is actually seven topics, each one a story of how one of the seven essential units that we use to measure the physical world came to be.
It is hard to engage the average reader on a topic this heady without said reader quickly losing interest. But Martin finds a way.
It’s for this reason the book made me think of a high school book and not a book from an institution of higher learning.
Tertiary education textbooks vomit information at you at an alarming rate, almost pelting you with it, not caring if you’re interested, just wanting to bombard you with facts and call it a day. It’s like listening to a nine-year-old tell you about their favourite YouTube series.
But high school books hold your hand a bit more. They take some time to make things interesting, often attempting to make them visually stimulating to engage different parts of the brain. And this, to me, is what Martin’s book felt like.
He doesn’t just tell you about the metre, second, kilogram, kelvin, ampere, mole and candela. He gives you the interesting scenery around their origin, often going quite far out into the weeds, but never straying so far from the original topic that we lose sight of why we’re there.
There are often sidebars on related topics, which are fascinating, as well.
For example, to understand the mole, you need to understand Avogadro’s number. And to understand Avogadro’s number, you need to know a little bit about large numbers and scientific notation.
Martin assumes no knowledge of these topics. He gives it to you — in a way that is as entertaining and informative as the rest of the book.
In other instances, he takes a tangent that is related but not essential to the understanding of the topic at hand. For example, the section in the chapter about the ampere, which diverts us into a discussion about nuclear fusion and the possibility of limitless clean energy.
In summary, books like this often fall into the trap of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”. Martin has done well to present a potentially dry topic as an engaging and interesting one.
A worthwhile read.
The Seven Measures of the World by Piero Martin is published by Yale University Press.
