Adumbration

"The Measure of All Things" - by Ken Alder (The Free Press, 2002)

Who among us has not wondered at one point or another why we don't have a decimal metric time, with days divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes, each containing 100 of a new sized metric second?  Of course, these new seconds would need to be about 86% as long as the old style second, or we would have days running into one another.  But that is a small matter.

And why not begone with the duodecimal clocks we face today?  Noon could be at 5, and there would be none of the confusing 24 hour clock or AM/PM distinctions, and we could easily tell how many hours until next week at this time.  There would be 100 hours, because our new decimal metric time would allow us to have 10 day weeks (with an extra day off midweek so you don't feel overworked).  Kids staying up till 10 would be getting a treat (but those out past 2 would be asked where they've been all night).

If we managed to pull all this off, we would not be the first to do so.  The French would have beat us to it by 200 years, because in the fervor surrounding the French revolution they introduced such changes at the same time as arriving at the length for the original meter and mass of the original gram, and the grad measure of angles (100 units per quarter).  They even came up with new names for all the days and months, and counted years beginning at the autumnal equinox (and of course year one marked the revolution itself).

But decimal time didn't stick, even with Napoleon spreading french-ness around Europe and beyond.  Too many clock towers to change, I suppose.  And while my first calculator could treat angles in grads, it has been the meter and gram that have stuck around and thrived. 

The story of how all this arose is what occupies "The Measure of All Things", an entertaining read by Ken Alder, which story follows the adventures of two world class geodeser/astronomers in their attempt to precisely measure a segment of longitude passing from Dunkirk through Paris to Barcelona.   The plan:  create a unit of length that would become a universal standard, "for all people for all time", because it would be based on the physical world upon which all people resided - 1 ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator.  The problem:  the earth isn't exactly round, and doesn't come close from the standpoint of the level of precision this pair were able to measure.  Add the Terror, international intrigue and war, the foibles and heroics of men, and the nature of scientific advance, and the result kept me entertained through many nights of a mild winter.

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[Thanks, Rex Morgan]