Book Review: Inventing Temperature - Hasok Chang

This is an important and informative book. Unfortunately, I did not get on with it at all.

The book is an ambitious look at the philosophy of science viewed through a unique lens. What is temperature? How do we define what freezing and boiling are if we don't have a thermometer? How do you invent a thermometer without stable references?

It goes right back to the beginning of science's quest to understand temperature:

Complementary science asks scientific questions that are excluded from current specialist science. It begins by re-examining the obvious, by asking why we accept the basic truths of science that have become educated common sense. ... I aim to show that many simple items of knowledge that we take for granted are in fact spectacular achievements, obtained only after a great deal of innovative thinking, painstaking experiments

Along the way it looks at the what-might-have-beens. Newton thought a temperature scale should be based on a "normal" man's blood temperature. Some early thermometers had freezing as 100 and boiling as 0.

Although some of the stories are told in a fairly casual manner, it does become quite intense and has intimidating sub-headings like "The Calorist Mirage of Gaseous Linearity".

I'd describe it as being thoroughly interesting, without being engaging.

If you are comfortable reading long passages like:

If we deal with phenomena outside the domain in which we originally defined our concepts, we may find physical hindrances to performing the operations of the original definition

You may do better than I.

I'm incredibly grateful that a book like this has been written - but I don't think it was was written with me in mind.