Bill Potts wrote in USMA 24361: In October, Ken Alder, the author of The Measure of All Things, gave a one-hour talk (including a question and answer period) at a bookstore in Winnetka, IL.
I was lucky enough to capture it just over an hour ago (at 00:00 PST) on CSPAN-2. As we've discussed here, already, the focus by reviewers on Mechain's error (and Delambre's cover up), does not represent Alder's position.
He sees the recognition of the error as the beginning of an awareness of the concept of uncertainty and points out that, in any case, the very slight "lumpiness" of the Earth gives rise to variations in the length of a meridian, depending on which meridian is measured.
I still think that Alder's subtitle, "The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World" is misleading and incorrect and designed to sell the book. On page 252 he admits that the International Commission of 1799 decided to base the metre on surveys made half a century earlier in Peru, France and Lapland. "the final determination of the meter was based on the very data that they [M�chain and Delambre] had been sent to supersede". -- Joseph B. Reid 17 Glebe Road West Toronto M5P 1C8 Telephone 416-486-6071
