By Larrie D. Ferreiro
An award-winning historian of technology unearths the riveting and little-known tale of a group of eighteenth-century eu scientists that journeyed to South the USA to calculate the form of the earth.
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Extra info for Measure of the Earth : the enlightenment expedition that reshaped our world
Example text
The Academy, in addition to supporting astronomy to improve ocean navigation, had carried out geodesic surveys of France to develop better maps for the army and for tax assessors. These surveys would indicate that the Earth was elongated at the poles, in direct con- 9780465017232-text_ferreiro 3/16/11 10:01 AM Page 11 THE PROBLEM OF THE EARTH’S SHAPE 11 trast to Newton’s flattened Earth. The first such surveys, carried out in 1670 by the astronomer Jean Picard, were too small in scope to show this.
By the same mechanism, the attraction of gravity holds the moon in its orbit around the Earth; without this attraction, the moon’s inertia would carry it off in a straight line as a result of centrifugal force. 9 While Newton may have been satisfied with his own explanation of gravity, others were not so easily convinced. When Newton published his massive three-volume Principia mathematica (Principles of Mathematics) in 1687, it was greeted by, in the words of the science historian I. ”10 In particular, Newton’s principle of universal attraction required a significant leap of faith that many of the greatest physicists of his day were unable to make.
From René Descartes, Principia philosophiae (1685). S. Naval Academy. 1). He studiously avoided any mathematical details in his reasoning, instead using a series of analogies with water eddies and magnetism to explain his theory. Two generations before Newton, Descartes had furnished his own Theory of Everything, one that relied on contact between objects and transfer of momentum to explain both the orbit of the moon and the fall of the apple. It made sense both mechanically and theologically; the universe, originally set in motion by the hand of God, continued to turn in a predetermined fashion.