Book Description

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 one ten-millionth of the distance between the 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 nations and for all time.

Yet when Ken Alder located the long-lost correspondence between the two men, along with their mission logbooks, he stumbled upon a two-hundred-year-old secret, and a drama worthy of the great French playwrights. The meter, it turns out, is in error. One of the two astronomers, Pierre-François-André Méchain, made contradictory measurements from Barcelona and, in a panic, covered up the discrepancy. The guilty knowledge of his misdeed drove him to the brink of madness, and ultimately to his death. Only then -- after 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 truth or the appearance of the truth?

To tell the story, Alder has not only worked in archives throughout Europe and America, but also bicycled the entire route traveled by Delambre and Méchain. Both a novelist and a prizewinning historian of science and the French Revolution, Alder summons all his skills to tell how the French Revolution mixed violent passion with the coldest sanity to produce our modern world. It was a time when scientists believed they could redefine the foundations of space and time, creating a thirty-day month, a ten-day week, and a ten-hour day. History, they declared, was to begin anew. But in the end, it was science that was forever changed. The measurements brought back by Delambre and Méchain not only made science into a global enterprise and made possible 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 story of two men, a secret, and a timeless human dilemma: is it permissible to perpetuate a small lie in the service of a larger truth? "Precision is a quest on which travelers, as Zeno foretold, journey halfway to their destination, and then halfway again and again 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 story for all people, for all time. ... Read more

Reviews (21)

The Dramatic Beginnings of the Metric System
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

A quest for a perfection
THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS is a delightfully written account of the quest by Delambre and Mechain, two astronomers who, in the midst of the French Revolution, attempt to use the latest technology (at that time) to triangulate various points along a meridian to find the perfect measurement, the meter. (One ten millionth the distance between the North Pole and the Equator) Along the way, they combat rapidly changing governments, ignorance and fear of the unknown, and most importantly (in Mechain's case), a crippling fear of error. The twists and turns of this enterprise are amazingly well-researched by Adler, and they are written in a style that is both informative and entertaining. Adler suggests that this quest led to nothing less than the transformation of how science was perceived by its practitioners; the change from the idea of savants (who believed in certain absolutes in science) to scientists (who were "engaged in a struggle to quantify their [scientists] uncertainty. ") The metric systems importance to France and the world at large is explained in political and economic terms that are easily digested by the reader, but at the heart of this book is the basic concept that how man deals with error; it can be his salvation or in the case of Mechain, his downfall. This is a wonderful examination of this momentous undertaking and well worth the time of anyone interested in man's constant efforts to utilize science for the improvement of the human condition.

A great story of science and history
The metric system of measurement is today used in every country except Myanmar, Libya and the United States. But have you ever stopped to think how long a metre is?

During the 18th Century, many French were aware of the inconsistencies that existed throughout the country when it came to measurement. For example, a pound of sugar in one town may be twice that found in the town down the road.

Therefore, the French Academy of Science decided that the new metric unit of measurement would be the metre and would be defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the Paris Meridian.

The measure of all things traces the journey of two scientists, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Francois-Andre Méchain, who had to accurately measure the distance from Barcelona to Dunkirk. This simple task took six years to complete, and along the way a mistake 'slipped' into Méchain's calculations, which plagued Méchain until his death. Because Delambre later concealed this miscalculation, the metre is 0.02 per cent shorter than it should be!

This book is a fantastic read, with easy to understand science mixed with a dash of history. It's great to read a book that places science into context and allows the reader to understand how and why things happened the way they did.

The author, Ken Adler, has been interested in science since his early days at school, but in recent years he has been drawn to the history of science, in particular, during the French Revolution. "It was a time of Utopian renewal, the end of history and the rebuilding of the world. Many people at the time turned to nature and reason," says Ken.

"In the beginning, the French could have stated that this (some arbitrary length) was the metre. But it would not have been accepted. By basing it on nature it was a political coup. It was a grand gesture by the scientists, and had the aura of being exact."

According to Ken, the United States is slowly coming around to the metric system. "The USA had uniform measures (based on the English system) early on, so there wasn't the incentive to change, unlike in France. It takes a huge political push to change, which currently does not exist," says Ken. "But it is changing; even Coke in the States is going metric."

This review appeared in The Helix science magazine (October 2003).

Science History as Entertainment
Disclaimer: Ken was a high school classmate with whom I have spoken once since graduation.

Prof. Alder's achievement in writing this book is considerable. Firstly, like any good historian, he brings to life a story (of the creation of the metre) that is familiar to few. In doing so, he also brings to our attention the two individuals charged with performing the measurements -- the metre was to be 1/40000000 of the "Paris Meridian" -- and the times in which they worked. Because those times happen to coincide with the demise of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, there is excitement and action aplenty, no minor thing for a history of science. That he also managed to unearth the undiscovered letters of Mechain and Delambre in the Paris Observatory to flesh out his understanding of the two principals makes this book an important academic work as well as a popular account of history.

Secondly, he tells a story that grips the reader. His book will naturally draw comparisons to Dava Sobel's "Longitude," but in my estimation Alder's story is the more compelling of the two. In fact, there is an additional similarity I would draw to Thomas Pynchon's fictional "Mason and Dixon," which likewise tells the story of two geographers traveling across perilous country to perform a measurement (or, in the case of Mason and Dixon, to draw boundaries). Of the two works, "The Measure of All Things" is the more readable account and no less poignant a story than that of Mason and Dixon.

Thirdly, from my perspective as a practicing scientist, Alder achieves yet more with this book. The tragic story of Mechain's horror regarding his perceived errors of measurement leads neatly into Alder's coda regarding the nature of error in measurement. Error analysis, now the staple of all science, was completely unknown in the time of Mechain, and consequently he was unable to perceive of the limitations of his own instrumentation and methods as the ultimate source of error. Instead, tormented by his sense of personal failure, Mechain drove himself to death in a misguided attempt to correct his mistakes. The pathos of this subplot transforms "The Measure of All Things" from a dry work of scholarship into the stunning work of literature that it is.

Anyone with an interest in science and history should find this book to be something special.

Much more interesting that the subject may seem.
The central theme of this book is the quest to measure the quarter meridian upon which Paris was built, and derive the official meter as 1/10,000,000 of that measurement. Two French savants were sent to measure from the end points of the meridian, one in Dunkirk, the other in Barcelona, and measure their way back to meet in the middle. They were using a new device to measure angles, one whose precision was only limited by the number of measurements taken. Against this story is the backdrop of the French Revolutions, whose violence and capriciousness is startling. The savants were arrested and detained as spies for "the enemy", were often stranded as the currency they set out with became devalued or useless, or were hampered by locals who thought any attempts to standardize measurements were only some government plot to cheat them. And of course, the main plot point, the southern savant, Mechain, had an discrepancy creep into his measurements, one that caused an error of only the thickness of a few sheets of paper, but catastrophic to the mission and eventually to Mechain's sanity.

The author brings a day-to-day familiarity to the mission, filling in the historical details without the story becoming a dusty history lesson. Not being one particulary interested in European history, I was nonetheless pulled into the tale and thoroughly enjoyed it. The tale was entertaining, and it also introduces one to the concept of "precision" versus "accuracy". ... Read more

Reviews (2)

SI (United States) measuring system
Breaks SI system into basic concepts (length, area, volume, mass, etc.) for easier understanding. Very helpful for those who grew up using inch-pound units by default and want to learn and use the SI system correctly.

Indexed, easy to look up and grasp concepts. Good visuals (length, area, volume, mass, temperature, etc.) Since SI is the only legal US measuring system since 1866 and is reinforced by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, since all federal agencies are mandated to use SI units since October 1992 and because K-12 and university teachers are expected to teach to standards - this is the book to keep close at hand.

Best I've Found Yet
For some time now I have been looking for a book to assist my students in learning the Metric System; however, I have found most of the texts to be overly technical in terminology or lacking the direct approach in this book. Good work :) ... Read more

Reviews (3)

A valuable reference work, with one flaw
I thoroughly enjoyed hunting in this book for various conversion factors, and would recommend it with just one reservation.

Unfortunately, the authors were somewhat arbitrary in deciding which units any particular one would be converted to. If I had written this book, I would have included at least the following for each unit: (1) All other units in the SAME system (i. e., if we are talking about a pre-revolutionary French unit of length, all other pre-revolutionary French units of length) and (2) the nearest-sized SI unit. Unfortunately they frequently leave out conversions between units of the same system that would be useful, and often units of the same approximate size are converted to different SI units, making comparisons difficult. (For example, one foot-size unit may be expressed as so many centimeters, while another as such a fraction of a meter.)

Both of these omissions can be circumvented by using a calculator and working with what these authors have chosen to include, but the book would be easier to use if they had done what I would have.

More info then you'll ever need
This little book has saved me a couple of times. Full of data, tables, conversions, etc.... Spend the money and get yourself a copy. You'll be amazed how often you reach for it.

Great source of conversion factors.
This is a handy book with literally thousands of conversions. Look up your unit, and convert to metric, or convert from a metric unit to your unit. The units are identified by the country of origin including ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, etc. ... Read more

Book Description

Mankind has a fascination with measurement. Down the centuries we have produced a plethora of incompatible and duplicatory systems for measuring everything from the width of an Egyptian pyramid to the concentration of radioactivity near a nuclear reactor and the value of the fine structure constant. With the introduction first of the metric system and of its successor the Système International d'Unités (SI), the scientific community has established a standard method of measurement based on only seven core units.

The ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SCIENTIFIC UNITS, WEIGHTS AND MEASURES converts the huge variety of units from all over the world in every period of recorded history into units of the SI.

Featuring: * An A - Z of conversion tables for over 10,000 units of measurements. * Tables of the fundamental constants of nature with their units. * Listings of professional societies, and national standardization bodies for easy reference. * An extensive bibliography detailing further reading on the multifarious aspects of measurement and its units.

This huge work is simply a "must have" for any reference library frequented by scientists of any discipline or by those with historical interests in units of measurement such as archaeologists.

SOME PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITION:

NEW SCIENTIST "If you tire of flicking through piles of textbooks looking for the formulas for converting noggins into litres or foot-pound-force per hour into megawatts, do not despair. Chuck out the lot and buy SCIENTIFIC UNIT CONVERSION by Francois Cardarelli which claims to contain every scientific unit ever used ... All weights, volumes, powers, areas, field strengths - you name it, it's here. A gem for engineers, scientists, historians, journalists ..."

CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY "This is a really extraordinary book ... thanks to an excellent, judiciously condensed method of presentation, permits the conversion into metric units of any type of measure." ... Read more

Reviews (1)

only conversion reference you will ever need
Tired of looking through books to find the correct conversion factor to another unit? Well, so was I. Since I deal with international engineering contracts, this book saves a great deal of time. It is extremely well formatted and easy to use. This book not only has the usual units, but also Japanese, and ancient systems as well. You won't need any other book - ever. The author challenges you to find a unit not listed, and send it to him for inclusion in the next edition. That alone should give you an idea of how thorough it is! This is a must for any technical field. Well organized, and well worth the price of the book. A real bargin. Also, fun to read. It gives the approved units for various systems, and states which ones are on the phase-out. Good to know if you are doing technical writing, and need to keep your units within the standards listed. ... Read more

Book Description

Indispensable for any homeowner, hobbyist, chef, or craftsperson, this entirely new volume replaces Running Press' highly successful compilation of practical facts. Here, in one convenient and attractively priced volume, is all the information necessary to measure objects and to convert from one system of measurements to another. Contains a fascinating range of knowledge on units and numbers, from shoe sizes to the longest rivers, from compound interest rates to life expectancies-plus, of course, all there is to know about weights, measurements, and other areas where precision is of the utmost importance. ... Read more

Book Description

The Economist Desk Companion How to Measure, Convert, Calculate and Define Practically Anything Featuring 75 pages of quick-access charts and tables, The Economist Desk Companion provides every international measurement and definition anyone could possibly need for: Accounting • Agriculture • Chemistry • Computers • Economics • Electronics • Energy • Engineering • Finance • Fishing • Food and Drink • Forestry • Health • Light, Optics, and Photography • Mathematics • Minerals and Alloys • South and Music • Paper, Packaging, and Printing • Statistics • Space and Time • Textiles • Transport • Weapons It also features timesaving conversions and calculations of complicated sums such as: Annual percentage rates • Net present values • Percentage reversals • Conversions of square inches into square centimeters • Barrels of oil into tons • Pounds force per square inch into kilograms force per square centimeter With its wide-ranging subject matter and extraordinary detail, The Economist Desk Companion will be indispensable to anyone involved in international business, from students to personal investors to CEOs. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Informative
helped me get me texts quicker, and my mental comparisons make a lot more sense. ... Read more

Book Description

This comprehensive and authoritative dictionary provides clear definitions of units, prefixes, and styles of weights and measures within the Systeme International (SI), as well as traditional, and industry-specific units. It also includes general historical and scientific background, covering the development of the sequential definitions and sizing of units. This new reference work will prove invaluable to professional scientists, engineers, technicians as well as to students and the general user. ... Read more

Book Description

Originally devised as a guide for converting from imperial to metric measurements, 'The Metric Handbook' has since been totally transformed into a major international handbook of planning and design data. The second edition has been completely updated, with most chapters being totally rewritten, to meet the needs of the modern designer.

The book contains nearly 50 chapters dealing with all the principal building types from airports, factories and warehouses, offices shops and hospitals, to schools, religious buildings and libraries. For each building type 'The Metric Handbook' gives the basic design requirements and all the principal dimensional data.

Several chapters deal with general aspects of building such as materials, lighting, acoustics and tropical design. There are also sections on general design data, including details of human dimensions and space requirements.

It is a unique authoritative reference for solving everyday planning problems. In its various editions it has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide, and continues to be a reference work belonging on every design office desk or drawing board.

* THE source of information to solve your everyday planning problems
* Easy to use provider of all data needed for the job
* Keeps you up to date with all the latest information ... Read more

Reviews (3)

dont buy this software
this cd cost 250 dollars, it is a plug-in program for autocad. it creats a new toolbar for autocad users to find images. However, i find this toolbar is NOT frinedly to use and it is hard to find images, and this software can't work in autocad 2000, it just can work with the outdate autocad (r13,R14). Further, this software not ever cover different size of common doors and windows. EDITOR, your CAD-library is not powerful enough. I personally believe this software is only worth 50 dollars.

CRITICISM
I have been told that there was a review that said that there were errors in the book. This is certainly so, I should know, I am the editor! No reference book as comprehensive as this will ever be perfect. However, if you, the customer, finds one of these, please tell me. My e-mail address is David_Adler@compuserve.com. Thank you.

Excellent references for Architects, a must-have book
I found many great referenced data on designing work space for my clients' projects, and also our new office. Can't work without this one. Excellent. ... Read more

Book Description

In recent years, turbulence has become a very lively area of scientific research and application, attracting many newcomers who need a basic introduction to the subject. Turbulent Flows ably meets this need, developing both physical insight and the mathematical framework needed to express the theory. The authors present basic theory and illustrate it with examples of simple turbulent flows and classical models of jets, wakes, and boundary layers.A deeper understanding of turbulence dynamics is provided by their treatment of spectral analysis and its applications. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Essential for the everyday inspector and/or manufacturer.
This is a bare-bones reference guide to the many print requirements that have become common and misunderstood. The definitions combined with graphic illustrations are a great resource, complimenting the larger text by the same author. The best guide to print reading for the inspector, or manufacturer who needs to understand what requirement is called out. All this, and its done in an easy to understand format, not overly dry, technical text. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (1)

An essential reference
Keep this book close at hand and you'll never despair, whether you need to convert feet to meters, gallons to liters, or short tons to slugs. ... Read more

Book Description

Metric Units and Conversion Charts A Metrication Handbook for Engineers, Technologists, and Scientists Second Edition Why waste your valuable time hunting for conversion factors, symbols, and units? With this handbook, you can convert from one measurement system to any other by means of 62 conversion charts covering almost every field of science. The charts are based on values published by the foremost authoritative sources such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). The charts are universal, and so conversions can be made quickly and confidently. This much-expanded second edition has the following features:
* The charts make a clear distinction between SI and other metric units by identifying SI units by red boxes.
* Official symbols of all SI units are given, along with the name of the unit.
* The recommended symbols for quantities are shown at the top of each chart.
* A new chapter on mass, force and gravity explains how the units of force were established.
* For introductory courses, chapters are included explaining quantity equations and numerical equations, together with worked-out examples.
* For classroom work, over 100 review questions, together with answers. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Pretty Handy
Handy and interesting book for Engineers of all disciplines. Although one can find resources on the web for free that do the same thing, the book is sometimes better because it shows the step by step conversion process in a way that allows a person to be more confident than a "black box" number. ... Read more

Book Description

Conversions Between Systems; Length Measurement; Square Measurement; Volume Measurement-Cubic Capacity; Volume Measurement; Liquid Capacity; Weight Measurement-Mass; Temperature Measurement; Metrics & Percents; Metrics & Technology ... Read more

Book Description

In this book, the author's goal is to provide an introduction tosome of the analytic underpinnings for the geometry of anti-selfduality in 4-dimensions. Anti-self duality is rather special to4-dimensions and the imposition of this condition on curvaturesof connections on vector bundles and on curvatures of Riemannianmetrics has resulted in some spectacular mathematics.

The book reviews some basic geometry, but it is assumed that thereader has a general background in differential geometry (aswould be obtained by reading a standard text on the subject).Some of the fundamental references include Atiyah, Hitchin andSinger, Freed and Uhlenbeck, Donaldson and Kronheimer, andKronheimer and Mrowka. The last chapter contains open problemsand conjectures. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Out of date, but still could be useful
The results in this book have been superseded by the results of Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten that appeared a short time after this book was published. The Seiberg-Witten theory caused great excitement among the mathematical community who do research in differential geometry and differential topology, particularly in the area of the differential toplogy of 4-dimensional manifolds. Proclaiming the "end of the Donaldson theory", mathematicians moved on to study the properties of the Seiberg-Witten equation, which is still nonlinear enough to be interesting.

Thus the discussions in this book are somewhat dated, but still could be of interest from a mathematical history standpoint or with the goal perhaps of motivating the Seiberg-Witten theory, although the self-dual Yang-Mills equations, a cornerstone of the Donaldson theory, are not discussed in the book. Instead the author studies the anti-self dual equations. These arise uniquely in four dimensions due to the fact that the Lie algebra so(4) of the special orthogonal group SO(4) is not simple, but instead decomposes as the direct sum of two copies of the Lie algebra so(3) of SO(3). This enables one to decompose the tangent bundle of the manifold into a direct sum of two oriented 3-plane bundles. The curvature of the Levi-Civita connection then splits with respect to this decomposition, the decomposition having entries involving the scalar curvature, the traceless Ricci tensor, and the self-dual and anti-self dual Weyl curvature tensors. The question of the existence of metrics on the manifold for which the anti-self dual part vanishes is the subject of the book, with particular attention paid to complex vector bundles over the manifold. The anti-self dual equations are consequently a set of algebraic equations for the curvature, which are equivalent, over an open set in the manifold, to a first-order differential equation involving a 1-form over this open set and taking values in the Lie algebra of complex 2-space. The main strategy the author employs for studying these equations is to show that they linearize to Fredholm equations. Thus a kind of generalization of the Fredholm property holds here in the context of (infinite-dimensional) vector bundles. A section of an infinite-dimensional vector bundle which linearizes to a Fredholm operator acts essentially like a section of a finite dimensional bundle over a finite dimensional manifold.

The book could also be used to motivate a study of the connection between the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds. That there is such a connection was recently conjectured and some promising work in proving this conjecture has appeared lately. There has also been recent interest in examining the anti-self dual equations on noncommutative four-dimensional Euclidean space, because of its connection with string theory. ... Read more