Monday, October 19, 2015

The Measure of the Roman Society

            The Romans standardized many things to create cohesion and unity including language, education, and government.  But one aspect of daily life that may easily be overlooked was the institution of a common measuring system.  In order to function well economically as a thriving empire, consumers needed to understand that buying a pound of goods from sources hundreds of miles away was equivalent to buying the same amount in their home town.  Not only did they need a lingua franca for general communication, they also needed to know that words of measurement meant the same thing wherever you went.  Weight, length, volume, and area, were all standardized across the civilization. 



           While many of our measurements differ from the Romans, a few, such as the mile and the ounce, are very similar to their ancient counterparts.  Even more importantly, we inherited the very idea of common dimension specifications across large groups of people.  From the cookie recipes conjured up on the other side of the country to the volume of water in the apartment complex swimming pool, common measurements that many different kinds of people accept strongly influence many aspects of my day-to-day life.


            That phenomenon is especially easy to see in the sciences, where the metric system unifies very specific thoughts and ideas across the globe.  In my own field, psychology, precise reaction times or neuron activity would be much harder to share with an international audience without standardized measurements.  Even more importantly, the metric system provides a common foundation for education in the sciences so that more everyday people understand clearly what scientific results mean and how they relate to their own life.  That creates a more knowledgeable public who can hold the scientific community accountable for their claims.  So the next time you bake a cake, run an experiment, or wonder why the mile that you're running couldn't be just a few feet shorter, thank the Romans.
"Road," no changes made, by Moyan Brenn. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

2 comments:

  1. I have never truly appreciated a standardized unit system for measurement. However, its obvious how important it's been while looking at the development of scientific theories. Einstein (German), for example, finalized his general theory of relativity with help from Lorentz (Dutch), Michaleson (American), and Poincare (French).

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  2. A lack of a standardized system of measurement would severely impede all sorts of progression, especially in the scientific field! The fact that we've clung to some of the same measurements that the Romans used goes to show how crucial it is to have, especially in a growing society.

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