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-- The Measure of All Things
Amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, two intrepid astronomers set out in opposite directions from Paris to measure the world, one voyaging north to Dunkirk, the other south to Barcelona. Their findings would help define the meter as you ten-millionth of the length between your pole and the equator, a standard that has since swept the planet. The Measure of All Things is the astonishing story of one of history's greatest scientific quests, a mission to measure the Earth and define the meter for all those nations and forever.
Yet when Ken Alder located the long-lost correspondence between your two men, with their mission logbooks, he stumbled after a two-hundred-year-old secret, and a drama worthy of the great French playwrights. The meter, as it happens, is at error. Among the two astronomers, Pierre-François-André Méchain, made contradictory measurements from Barcelona and, in a panic, covered the discrepancy. The guilty understanding of his misdeed drove him to the brink of madness, and ultimately to his death. Only then -- following the meter had already been publicly announced -- did his partner, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, discover the truth and face a fateful choice: what matters more, the reality or the appearance of the reality?
To inform the story, Alder has not only worked in archives throughout Europe and America, but also bicycled the whole route traveled by Delambre and Méchain. Both a novelist and a prizewinning historian of science and the French Revolution, Alder summons all his skills in order to the way the French Revolution mixed violent passion with the coldest sanity to produce our modern world. It had been a time when scientists believed they could redefine the foundations of space and time, making a thirty-day month, a ten-day week, and a ten-hour day. History, they declared, was to commence anew. However in the finish, it was science that was forever changed. The measurements cut back by Delambre and Méchain not only made science into a global enterprise and permitted our global economy, but also revolutionized our understanding of error. Where Méchain conceived of error as a personal failure, his successors learned to tame it.
This, then, is a tale of two men, a secret, and a timeless human dilemma: could it be permissible to perpetuate a little lie in the service of a more substantial truth? "Precision is a quest which travelers, as Zeno foretold, journey halfway to their destination, and then halfway over and over and again, never reaching finality." In The Measure of All Things Ken Alder describes a quest that succeeded even as it failed. It is a tale for everyone, forever.
