m001's Full Review: Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone G...
Dava Sobel casts a sympathetic and literate eye upon the early history of the Age of Exploration in 'Longitude', documenting the events that led to our ability to reckon East-West position and hence navigate without reliance upon star position. It is probably more specific to state that this is the history of the invention of a mobile time-keeping device, a clock that can be set at your point of origin and that continues to reckon time accurately as you move from that point. The significance of such an invention may not seem immediately apparent, but Sobel explicates the simple elegance of the idea and its application to navigation in entertaining, well-researched detail.
This is also the story of science and its relationship to society after the Scientific Revolution--a tale of science in its applied form, being used to solve a concrete problem for specific results. In the age of Newton, when most scientific inquiry focused on developing large mathematical and physical systems to explain phenomena like planetary motion, this was unusually pragmatic, strikingly concrete. Sobel humanizes the quest for the 'longitude clock' in terms of personal motivation and competition, something modern readers (and, yes, modern scientists) can relate to. Much of what is discussed in 'Longitude' presages the intense, fervent race for modern, utilitarian scientific discovery (like the race to find medical cures, the race to put satellites in orbit, or the race to develop better weather-prediction technology). Sobel has a wonderful sense of the history of these early scientists and the world stage upon which their work played itself out.
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for ...More at HotBookSale
Sobel presents the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of John Harrison s 40-year obsession with building the perfect timekeeper, kno...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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