The Measure of All Things
The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In June 1792, amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, two intrepid astronomers set out in opposite directions on an extraordinary journey. Starting in Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre would make his way north to Dunkirk, while Pierre-François-André Méchain voyaged south to Barcelona. Their mission was to measure the world, and their findings would help define the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator—a standard that would be used “for all people, for all time.”
The Measure of All Things is the astonishing tale of one of history’s greatest scientific adventures. Yet behind the public triumph of the metric system lies a secret error, one that is perpetuated in every subsequent definition of the meter. As acclaimed historian and novelist Ken Alder discovered through his research, there were only two people on the planet who knew the full extent of this error: Delambre and Méchain themselves.
By turns a science history, detective tale, and human drama, The Measure of All Things describes a quest that succeeded as it failed—and continues to enlighten and inspire to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alder delivers a triple whammy with this elegant history of technology, acute cultural chronicle and riveting intellectual adventure built around Delambre's and M chain's famed meridian expedition of 1792 1799 to calculate the length of the meter. Disclosing for the first time details from the astronomers' personal correspondences (and supplementing his research with a bicycle tour of their route), Alder reveals how the exacting M chain made a mistake in his calculations, which he covered up, and which tortured him until his death. M chain, remarkably scrupulous even in his doctoring of the data, was driven in part by his conviction that the quest for precision and a universal measure would disclose the ordered world of 18th-century natural philosophy, not the eccentric, misshapen world the numbers suggested. Indeed, Alder has placed Delambre and M chain squarely in the larger context of the Enlightenment's quest for perfection in nature and its startling discovery of a world "too irregular to serve as its own measure." Particularly fascinating is his treatment of the politics of 18th-century measurement, notably the challenge the savants of the period faced in imposing a standard of weights and measures in the complicated post ancien r gime climate. Alder convincingly argues that science and self-knowledge are matters of inference, and by extension prone to error. Delambre, a Skeptical Stoic, was the more pragmatic and, perhaps, the more modern of the two astronomers, settling as he did for honesty in error where precision was out of reach.
