By Ken Alder
ISBN-10: 074321675X
ISBN-13: 9780743216753
-- The degree of All Things
Amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, intrepid astronomers set out in contrary instructions from Paris to degree the realm, one voyaging north to Dunkirk, the opposite south to Barcelona. Their findings might aid outline the meter as one ten-millionth of the space among the pole and the equator, a typical that has seeing that swept the planet. The degree of All Things is the striking tale of 1 of history's maximum clinical quests, a undertaking to degree the Earth and outline the meter for all countries and all the time.
but while Ken Alder positioned the long-lost correspondence among the 2 males, besides their venture logbooks, he stumbled upon a two-hundred-year-old mystery, and a drama necessary of the good French playwrights. The meter, it seems, is in blunders. one of many astronomers, Pierre-François-André Méchain, made contradictory measurements from Barcelona and, in a panic, coated up the discrepancy. The accountable wisdom of his misdeed drove him to the threshold of insanity, and finally to his dying. merely then -- after the meter had already been publicly introduced -- did his accomplice, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, realize the reality and face a fateful selection: what concerns extra, the reality or the looks of the reality?
to inform the tale, Alder has not just labored in documents all through Europe and the USA, but in addition bicycled the total direction traveled by means of Delambre and Méchain. either a novelist and a prizewinning historian of technological know-how and the French Revolution, Alder summons all his abilities to inform how the French Revolution combined violent ardour with the coldest sanity to provide our glossy global. It used to be a time while scientists believed they can redefine the principles of area and time, making a thirty-day month, a ten-day week, and a ten-hour day. heritage, they declared, was once to start anew. yet after all, it was once technological know-how that used to be perpetually replaced. The measurements introduced again via Delambre and Méchain not just made technological know-how right into a international firm and made attainable our international financial system, but in addition revolutionized our knowing of blunders. the place Méchain conceived of errors as a private failure, his successors discovered to tame it.
This, then, is a narrative of 2 males, a mystery, and a undying human limitation: is it permissible to perpetuate a small lie within the carrier of a bigger fact? "Precision is a quest on which tourists, as Zeno foretold, trip midway to their vacation spot, after which midway repeatedly and back, by no means achieving finality." In The degree of All Things Ken Alder describes a quest that succeeded while it failed. it's a tale for every body, forever.
Read or Download The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World PDF
Similar measurements books
Get Grundkurs Strahlenschutz: Praxiswissen für den Umgang mit PDF
Das Buch bietet eine sehr praktisch ausgerichtete Einführung in die Probleme des Strahlenschutzes, seine physikalischen Grundlagen – wie die Wechselwirkung ionisierender Strahlung mit Materie – die biologische Strahlenwirkung, die Quellen der Strahlenbelastung aus unserer Umwelt, die Messmethoden im Strahlenschutz (Dosimetrie) und die praktische Wahrnehmung des Strahlenschutzes.
Download e-book for iPad: Measurement and Instrumentation. Theory and Application by Alan S Morris
Size and Instrumentation introduces undergraduate engineering scholars to the dimension rules and the variety of sensors and tools which are used for measuring actual variables. in line with Morriss size and Instrumentation rules, this fresh textual content has been absolutely up-to-date with assurance of the newest advancements in such dimension applied sciences as clever sensors, clever tools, microsensors, electronic recorders and screens and interfaces.
Designing Quantitative Experiments: Prediction Analysis - download pdf or read online
The strategy of Prediction research is appropriate for an individual drawn to designing a quantitative test. The layout section of an test may be damaged down into challenge established layout questions (like the kind of apparatus to take advantage of and the experimental setup) and widely used questions (like the variety of facts issues required, variety of values for the autonomous variables and size accuracy).
- Nuclear physics and data for material analysis
- Hadron Structure in Electroweak Precision Measurements
- Response Matrix Measurements and Applications to Particle Storage Rings
- Measurement Uncertainty: An Approach via the Mathematical Theory of Evidence
- Measures and Probabilities
Extra info for The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Example text
The meter, it turns out, is in error, an error which has been perpetuated in every subsequent redefinition of its length, including our current definition of the meter in terms of the distance traveled by light in a fraction of a second. According to today’s satellite surveys, the length of the meridian from the pole to the equator equals 10,002,290 meters. 2 millimeters short, or about the thickness of two pages of this book. It may not seem like much, but it is enough to feel with your fingers, enough to matter in high-precision science, and in that slender difference lies a tale of two men sent out in opposite directions on a Herculean task—a mission to measure the world—who discovered that integrity could carry them in directions as contrary as their carriages.
So by the side of the road, within sight of the reedy banks of the Seine, Delambre unpacked his instruments and explained his mission. It was a warm end-of-summer afternoon—perfect weather for an outdoor seminar—and the size of the crowd swelled as word spread that a scientific sideshow was underway at the edge of the town. The local militia had stopped some highfalutin carriages bearing mysterious instruments toward the frontier. As newcomers joined the throng, they insisted on being brought up to speed.
He was a small, ugly man, and impossibly vain. He liked to boast he was as ugly as Socrates. If he was not the world’s greatest astronomer—as he sometimes seemed to think—he was certainly its most famous, having trained many of the world’s leading practitioners, the most recent of whom was Pierre-François-André Méchain. ” Lalande lent Delambre a three-and-a-half-foot sextant and began to incorporate his student’s observations into the third edition of his Astronomy. Delambre’s eyesight had steadily improved with the years.
The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder
by Richard
4.1