The Measure of All Things : The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World

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Summary: Boring, repeating, repeating, boring
Review: The story of this book is that two persons decided to measure the earth (from the North Pole to the Ecuador), divide that length by 10 million and that would be the length of the meter, they will need a year to do that, after seven years that one went to the north of France and the other to the south of Spain (to measure that part of the Earth and calculate the rest to the Pole and the Ecuador) they had a mistake of 2 millimeters in the length of the meter, those 2 millimeters mean a mistake of the measure of the Earth of more than 2,000 Km. (1,250Mi), so in the first year they could say what is the length of the meter with out doing any measure, why? Because one of them saw his mistake and change all his calculations to put them more or less exactly as the other person.
This story you will read it in more than 350 pages.

Meanwhile in the book says how they do their measure about 100 times and I don't think many people will understand those measures, first of all because you never know which unit of measure they used, and it also explains the french revolution and things that really doesn't have to do with the story of the meter length.

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Summary: Science is not discovery - more of a journey
Review: The sub-title of this book is `The Seven Year Odyssey that Transformed The World'. This journey is both geographical and intellectual, with the very practical aim of creating a definitive unit of length based upon the physical world that would replace the myriad of local and regional measures that were in use in France towards the end of the eighteenth century. Theoretically, if ANY unit could be defined, then all other units could be based upon it. (The gram to be the weight of one cubic centimetre of water, money to be the value of a certain weight of silver, although time might be slightly more problematical).

Set against the upheaval in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Francois-André Méchain journeyed to measure the meridian of Paris from Dunkerque to Barcelona in 1792, little realising the time it would take. If like me, you do not understand the science of geodesy, this is still a very good read, and although the technical details of, for example, Borda's circle are given, this revolutionary (pun intended) piece of equipment can be appreciated from afar. The journeying enabled the metre to be defined, this being one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, as extrapolated from the measurements of the meridian through France and into Spain. An unforeseen consequence was that the knowledge of the shape of the earth was changed forever by the measurements taken. Hitherto, it had been seen as a uniform, if oblate (fatter at the equator) sphere, if measured at the equator.

A reading of this work may raise lots of questions, for example about theories of measurement and error compensation (after all, geodesaic triangulation has to compensate for the curvature of the earth; the sum of the angles of a triangle may not equal 180º). It also speaks about the nature of science, and whether it is better to `published and be damned', or to work and rework calculations ad infinitum. Of the two measurers, Méchain was haunted by his seemingly inconsistent results, and he wasted much time, and only published his results under duress. However, the everlasting legacy of their journey is the metre as defined by results. The fact that the measurement is now seen as "incorrect" is almost an incidental fact. (The metre is not as accurate as the `provisional metre', adopted as an interim measure whilst the astronomers triangulated their way through France). More recent definitions of the metre keep the established and erroneous distance, redefining this special distance with respect to other basic units (now the distance that light can travel through a vacuum in a very small, precisely defined unit of time). Science can be based upon `wrong' results, but it can still be very useful.

Measuring everything against a basic unit derived from nature was a laudable aim, probably a child of the enlightenment times. This coverage of the historical journey is very well researched, and shows that neither the intellectual nor the geographical journey was a straight line. You can travel with the author to discover more than just a story. It is more of a journey of how we journey. For serious students, there are ample source references to explore the subject further. Sources are often in French, but located in scientific or university libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Peter Morgan, Bath UK ([e-mail])

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Summary: The Dramatic Beginnings of the Metric System
Review: What do the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia have in common, as opposed to every other nation in the world? The answer is that they are the only nations not to have embraced the metric system. Inevitably, they will; their scientists all use it, and cars are made by it, and trading with other nations requires it. The inevitability of victory of the metric system is something Napoleon himself recognized: "Conquests will come and go," he declared, "but this work will endure." The work he spoke of was the defining of the meter, and it was a task begun in the final days of the French monarchy. In 1792, two French astronomers set out separately on the quest to make an accurate measurement of the globe, a measurement that would enable people to use the constant of the size of the globe as the foundation for rational weights and measures. Their plan was to measure enough of the distance of a north-south meridian through Paris that they would then be able to calculate the distance from the equator to the north pole, and one ten-millionth of that natural distance would be the meter. They aimed for unprecedented precision, and they got it, but they didn't get it exactly, for fascinating reasons all wonderfully told in _The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World_ (The Free Press) by Ken Alder.

It seems a simple task; a line of longitude from Dunkirk south to Barcelona would be mapped and calculated by triangulating high points, like mountains and steeples, along the line. In practice, it was devilishly, maddeningly, and lethally difficult. Weather, disease, the ravages of time, superstition, politics, and war all conspired to make the work of a few months stretch into years. The astronomer Delambre, heading north, was mistaken for an aristocrat, detained, and suspected of using a church tower as a royalist beacon. His partner Méchain, who took the southern route, had similar problems, and worse ones, as war with Spain erupted while he was in Spain. He had a fiendish obsession with exactitude, and made measurements of Barcelona's latitude by reckoning from the stars. Unfortunately, they were wrong due to refraction from the atmosphere, and Méchain knew they were wrong, but couldn't get them right. The knowledge of the error tortured him for the rest of his life. Méchain's error is not the error referred to in the book's subtitle. All the triangulation work had shown that the critics had been right from before the beginning, for the work could not produce a perfectly precise meter; the world was too irregular for that. The astronomers' work had produced, however, documentation of the more interesting fact of Earthly irregularity.

This story could not have been presented in a more dramatic and entertaining manner. An epic about the foundation of the metric system might seem to be impossible, but Alder has made the personalities interesting. He has also made clear the process of triangulation, the equipment required, and the scientific philosophy of what an error actually is. He has well described the history of the period, and the failures of the French Revolution, such as the calendar containing twelve months of three ten-day weeks each, or the clock with ten one-hundred minute hours in a day. Beside the origin of the admirable metric system of weights and measures, Alder has also given a brief history of how the world has adopted the system, which Americans ought to know about, since, with reluctance, we are having to use it more and more