How big is a ‘drop’? There’s no single right answer to this, but historically, the same people who wanted to banish it from the metric system ended up giving in to its ubiquitous use in both chemistry and medicine. To understand why is to understand the role that measurement plays in directing attention to the right places at the right time. While standard units encourage “trust in numbers” to do our thinking for us, nonstandard units make us pay attention to what’s in front of us, whether it’s a chemical reaction taking place or an individual patient.
Rebecca Jackson, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Measurement Lab and the Affective Experience Lab, recently co-authored a prize-winning paper on this subject. The paper The Drop and the Metric System won the Trevor Levere Best Paper Prize for 2025, and was published open access in Annals of Science earlier this month.
Rebecca’s co-authors Armel Cornu and Sarah Hijmans attended as keynote speakers for the Measurement Heretics Workshop: Being, Meaning and Measuring Well to talk about their research that led to the paper. The recording of this talk is available below:
Cornu, A., Hijmans, S. and Jackson, R. L. (2026) ‘The drop and the metric system: how an unruly unit survived revolutions’, Annals of Science, pp. 1–28.
