The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
In "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World," Simon Winchester explores the profound impact of precision engineering on contemporary society. Central to the narrative is the theme of measurement and the relentless pursuit of accuracy, which has transformed industries and daily life. Winchester highlights the stringent cleanliness standards in precision manufacturing, exemplified by ISO standards, illustrating humanity's shift towards an almost sterile environment compared to the natural world. The book delves into the evolution of technology, showcasing the staggering number of transistors in modern devices,15 quintillion,signifying an era of unprecedented complexity and capability in electronics. This surge in precision raises philosophical questions about the limits of measurement; as engineering reaches atomic levels, the very essence of matter becomes elusive, echoing Heisenberg's insights from quantum mechanics. Winchester also reflects on cultural attitudes toward precision, particularly in countries like Japan, where punctuality and meticulousness are integral to societal values. By intertwining historical anecdotes, technological advancements, and philosophical musings, the author presents precision not just as a technical achievement but as a fundamental aspect of modern existence. Ultimately, "The Perfectionists" posits that while humans strive for perfection, the inherent ambiguity of matter and the constraints of our faculties challenge the notion of absolute precision.
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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World:
They are clean to the far more brutally restrictive demands of ISO number 1, which permits only 10 particles of just one-tenth of a micron per cubic meter, and no particles of any size larger than that. A human being existing in a normal environment swims in a miasma of air and vapor that is five million times less clean.
Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.
American Precision Museum, in Windsor, Vermont,
From a book talk in Palo Alto for "The Perfectionists";He pulled out his new iphone and told us that its Apple-designed chipset has 8 billion[!] transistors, and that someone at Intel told him that there are now more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world's trees. Something like 15 quintillion of them!
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the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous.
Or maybe precision is itself reaching some kind of limits, where dimensions can be neither made nor measured—not so much because humans are too limited in their faculties to do so but, rather, because as engineering reaches ever downward, the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous. The German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, in helping in the 1920s to father the concepts of quantum mechanics, made discoveries and presented calculations that first suggested this might be true: that in dealing with the tiniest of particles, the tiniest of tolerances, the normal rules of precise measurement simply cease to apply. At near-and subatomic levels, solidity becomes merely a chimera; matter comes packaged as either waves or particles that are by themselves both indistinguishable and immeasurable and, even to the greatest talents, only vaguely comprehensible.
Time is the longest distance between two places.—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, THE GLASS MENAGERIE (1944)
There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world. In 2015, the four major chip-making firms were making 14 trillion transistors every single second.
In Japan it is more: precision in all things—not least in everyday railway services of such legendary punctuality that an apology had to be offered late in 2017 when an express left twenty seconds early—can be thought of as part of the national religion.
Perfection is the child of time.—BISHOP JOSEPH HALL, WORKS
