The Measure of All Things

[Richard Romeo]

Hi all--I read the NY Times review this past week and have a hold on the
book from the veritable NYPL--thought others may be interested--heck,
even the initials are right on.

P.S.  I like the Card Table analogy with the Internet.  good stuff...
P.P.S.  I wonder if Mr. Quail will be adding the Minstral Island work of
Pynchon/Sale on his veritable Web site.

enjoy
Rich

Editorial Reviews
>From 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 Mechain'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 Mechain made a mistake in his calculations,
which he covered up, and which tortured him until his death. Mechain,
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 Mechain 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 regime 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.