Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
legal codes and bureaucratic procedures. His idea, soaked in the blood of his enemies,
was that he would unify the country to which his name is given - China - by estab-
lishing standard forms of coinage, weights and measures. He also standardized the
various spoken languages in his kingdom into written pictures drawn the same no
matter what their spoken form so he could receive reports that he could read from
his officials throughout the country. He even established a standard length for the
axles of carriages so that it was possible to drive through archways and over bridges
along roads from border to border. These measures made it possible to communicate
and trade across the whole of the empire, knitting the country together.
Similarly, when the new government of France took command after the French
Revolution late in the eighteenth century, it took on the problem of the development
of a system of weights and measures to unify the French people across the entire
country. Gallic logic and communard feeling suggested that standards of weights and
measures should be not based on arbitrary diktats laid down from above, especially
not based on such a transient thing as the size of a monarch's body. Standards of
measurement should also not be considered matters of national authority (a stance
which practically guarantees that the standards would not be internationally adopted).
International standards, making it possible to develop both trade and communication
between different people, should be based on natural quantities that belonged to no
one and to everyone. This was the origin of the meter and the metric system of units.
The French people have continued this historical direction for two hundred years and
even now are pushing to improve trading standards across the European Union.
THE MERIDIAN also played a part in making what some would argue was the
most significant discovery of science - the law of gravitation. Curiously this scien-
tific law of remote celestial bodies was a turning point, not only for the abstract
science of astronomy but also for science in general. Sir Isaac Newton's mathematical
law of gravity changed our perception of the laws of nature. It made understandable
in mathematical form rules of nature that otherwise seemed arbitary. It enabled
scientists to predict the future, even the return of a comet after 74 years invisibility
in the far reaches of the solar system. It set the standard to which scientists now
aspire in developing the truths in their own science.
Newton's theory also altered our perception of ourselves and the Universe we live
in. Since the law of gravitation applies equally to the planets and to objects on the
surface of the Earth, such as a falling apple, it puts us into the Universe; we are
a part
of the way that it works, not
apart
from it. This scientific perspective found resonance
in the political and social egalitarianism of the revolutionaries and the humanists.
The Paris Meridian played a role in changing scientists' minds about gravitation.
Measurements along the meridian of the shape of the Earth were instrumental in
showing that Newton's Theory of Gravity was convincingly correct. But for the
French there is also a bitter sweetness about the Paris Meridian. First created in the
seventeenth century, and an admired scientific work, its status fell at the end of the
nineteenth century when it was passed over as the choice of the Prime Meridian of
the world. Following France, many countries had developed maps based on meridians
through their national observatory thus causing great confusion among sailors when
