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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 15, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Ken Alder

"The Measure of the World"

ABSTRACT -- In June 1792, in the midst of the French Revolution, two astronomers set out from Paris on a mission to measure the size of the world. Their goal was to establish a new universal standard of measurement equal to one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator -- a unit to be known as the meter. After seven years of adventure and mishap they returned to a hero's welcome in Paris. "Conquests will come and go," Napoleon announced, "but this work shall endure." In the past two hundred years the meter has indeed become the measure of the world, used by 95% of the world's people. Yet all this time a secret error has lurked at the heart of the metric system, an error known to the two astronomers and hidden by them from public view, an error whose full meaning and significance has only now been discovered in the archives. This lecture will recount the history of the Revolutionary expedition to measure the world and the human drama of moral choice in science. In doing so, it will examine the origin of one of the crucial tools at the heart of modern science -- error analysis -- as well as the rise of modern geodesy and the significance of history's first debate over economics of globalization. As an added bonus, it will also explain why, despite the best efforts of Thomas Jefferson, the United States is still the only country in the world (aside from Liberia and Mynamar) to stand outside the metric system.

SPEAKER -- Ken Alder is Professor of History and the Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where he directs the program in Science in Human Culture. Alder was born and raised in Berkeley, California, where he was part of a bussing program to achieve racial integration in the public schools, the subject of his first novel, The White Bus (New York, 1987). Alder earned an A.B. in physics at Harvard University, and in 1991 received his Ph.D. from Harvard in the history of science. Alder's first book of history, Engineering the Revolution (Princeton 1997), examined the relationship between science, technology, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. It won the 1998 Dexter Prize for the best book published in the field of the history of technology. His second book, The Measure of All Things (New York and London, 2002), tells the story of the two astronomers charged during the French Revolution with the task of measuring the size of the world so as to define a new unit of measure -- the meter -- and the resulting transformation in science and the global economy. Measure is being translated into fourteen languages and was the co-winner of the Kagan Prize of The Historical Society for the best book in European history in 2002-03, as well as the winner of the Davis Prize of the History of Science Society and the Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science. Currently, Alder is working on the history the American lie detector, an examination of how science has (and has not) contributed to American justice.




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