Given the breadth of Marcus du Sautoy’s cultural scholarship, it was a small surprise that British poet Andrew Marvell wasn't name-checked at the start of the presenter’s new three-parter Precision: The Measure of All Things. “Had we but world enough and time,” the great Metaphysical wooer called to his Coy Mistress, touching directly on the subjects of episode one, “Time and Distance”. Time was equally of the essence for du Sautoy, who barely caught breath in his (more respectable) urgency to explain everything behind his subject, and how it touched on the world we live in. The unforgiving minute, indeed.
With landmarks like The Story of Maths behind him, du Sautoy is now a bit of a screen natural, making the appeal of measuring things with ever-increasing degrees of accuracy seem real, even infectious. Whether we will really have found our own human order when we’ve quantified the last unknown out there, and bested the extremes of precision, may be a subject for psychologists, but in this attempt, with du Sautoy as our guide, it sure was thrilling.
There’s a beguiling element of competition, as du Sautoy predicts part two's battle in which 'the best minds in measurement science fight it out'
It proved a cultural journey as much as anything else: from the Lascaux caves, where stars and stags set the weeks and the seasons, to the Pyramids, which wouldn’t have happened without the cubit (local administrators faced the death penalty, apparently, if they didn’t annually recalibrate against the Pharaoh’s cubit). Monty Python territory loomed occasionally close, though du Sautoy resisted any hint of a snigger, as we learnt that the 12th-century British yard was the length from the King’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb.
Things weren’t any clearer across the Channel, when pre-revolutionary France had apparently more than a quarter of a million different weights and measures (the sheer vocabulary of it all!). If rivalry across la Manche was an ongoing issue – Greenwich trumped in the dateline stakes – France won for the sheer bloody-mindedness with which they set the metre (main picture). Two valiant Gallic triangulators set out from Dunkirk and Barcelona in 1791 hoping to meet somewhere in the middle: they duly did, seven years later, their journeys complicated not least by the uncertain atmosphere of the aftermath of the Revolution (pictured right, getting to grips with a triangulating telescope).
Ahead of us are “Mass and Moles”, the latter referring to the shyest of the seven units of measurement, before it all concludes with “Light, Heat and Electricity”. There’s a beguiling element of competition set up, as du Sautoy predicts part two's battle in which “the best minds in measurement science fight it out”, and there can only be one winner. One of their foes comes right out of the wrestling ring, too – that’s “Le Grand K”, once the world’s master kilogramme, but now, it seems, shedding weight alarmingly.
By the end registering each new advancement started to leave me breathless, as one possible climax followed another with more frequency even than in Isolde’s Liebestod. It made you wonder if there was another side to be found in this battle with precision, a sort of Slow Food movement of measurement. If there is, and it has an unofficial headquarters, it must be in the Cairo taxi where du Sautoy admitted to being flummoxed by a speedometer reading both miles and kilometres. Cairo traffic being as special as it is, he was prompted to a truly jaw-dropping admission – that he’d never understood the first thing about how shoe sizes are measured. The germ of something there, surely? BBC Four, take note.
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