Introductory notes for the Acta IMEKO Special Issue on "Historical papers on fundamentals of measurement"

Abstract

The term “Acta IMEKO” was originally used to designate the proceedings of the IMEKO World Congresses, and explicitly the first twelve Congresses from Budapest, Hungary, 1958, to Beijing, China, 1991, held in a period of about thirty crucial years for our scientific, technological, social, and political history. This Special Issue of the (new) Acta IMEKO journal offers the reader a small selection of papers on fundamentals aspects of measurement, that were originally published in those proceedings. It is an opportunity, first of all, to pay a tribute to the many distinguished colleagues that excellently contributed to the development of measurement science in the context of IMEKO, but also to celebrate IMEKO in its history and unique role in the promotion of international sharing of knowledge and collaboration among scientists. Despite the common feeling that we live in an epoch of extraordinary, and extraordinarily rapid, changes, the papers that have been reissued here mainly maintain their scientific significance, for the outstanding visions and analyses that propose, while their most temporally situated positions are often of great interest as lively witnesses of what the state and the perspectives of measurement science were a few decades ago. A chronological study on the (original) Acta IMEKO might be conducted, for example, on the changes induced on measurement by the progressive diffusion of digital devices and numerical methods, and the corresponding formation of the concept of measuring systems as information machines. Unmodified significance of the basic proposals and historical interest of the foreseen perspectives: these have been the guiding principles in the selection of the papers for the present Special Issue, all of them sharing an interest in contributing to the development of a well-structured, systemic interpretation of the fundamentals of measurement (the selection has been limited by the unfortunate fact that not all volumes of the proceedings were available in the selection stage). In the present social and economic situation more and more emphasizing the role and the importance of measurement processes, identifying the pivotal elements of a culture of measurement becomes a critical task for metrology, the “science of measurement and its application” (as the International Vocabulary of Metrology defines it), possibly formalized in the development of a body of knowledge on measurement science. The diachronic perspective offered by these papers might give some contributions in highlighting continuities and discontinuities in fundamental concept formation in the last fifty years of measurement-related scientific and technical history. The reader might be interested to know that the current default choice of English as the only language for the published papers is relatively recent in the context of the IMEKO community: in the first fifteen years of Acta IMEKO, multiple options were available as for the language of papers (and the proceedings of the first two Congresses, Budapest, Hungary, 1958 and 1961, include texts in five languages, English, French, German, Hungarian, and Russian!). On the other hand, only English written papers have been selected for this Special Issue. The reissued papers are identical in contents to the originals (having thus accepted lack of homogeneity in the layout, abstract and keywords, sometimes absent), and they have only IMEKO dedicates this Special Issue to 2014 World Metrology Day, that celebrates the signature of the