In comparison, the disappointments experienced by Britain's eighteen scattered observers were mild. Mason found himself paired with a young surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon and apparently they got along well, for they formed a lasting partnership. 比较而...
It was history's first cooperative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness, or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment brok...
At his urging, the Royal Society agreed to engage a reliable figure to tour the British Isles to see if such a mountain could be found. Maskelyne knew just such a personthe astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason. Maskelyne and Mason had become friends...
Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working toward a result they didn't wish to find only to learn now that they weren't even the first to find it. Listlessly, they completed their survey, which confirmed that the first French tea...
To complicate matters, after Picard's death the father-and-son team of Giovanni and Jacques Cassini repeated Picard's experiments over a larger area and came up with results that suggested that the Earth was fatter not at the equator but at the poles...
Norwood's two daughters brought their father additional pain by making poor marriages. One of the husbands, possibly incited by the vicar, continually laid small charges against Norwood in court, causing him much exasperation and necessitating repeat...
Starting with his back against the Tower of London, Norwood spent two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York, repeatedly stretching and measuring a length of chain as he went, all the while making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise...
Newton's laws explained so many thingsthe slosh and roll of ocean tides, the motions of planets, why cannonballs trace a particular trajectory before thudding back to Earth, why we aren't flung into space as the planet spins beneath us at hundreds of...
Principia's production was not without drama. To Halley's horror, just as work was nearing completion Newton and Hooke fell into dispute over the priority for the inverse square law and Newton refused to release the crucial third volume, without whic...
At Principia's heart were Newton's three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that ever...
