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Fun Science
A Review by Adrienne Miller

This historical page-turner about how two eighteenth-century French astronomers (one an exacting idealist, who believed perfection, in measurement and everything else, was more than an abstract Enlightenment construct — that it was really possible; the other a deeply practical man who knew it was not) sought to establish a universal standard for measurement is as irresistible as a thriller. This standard became the meter, and the story of how the meter became the meter is fraught with duplicity and deceit. Alder, the author of Engineering the Revolution, uncovered correspondence between the scientists, Pierre-François-André Méchain (the idealist) and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (the pragmatist), revealing that Mechain made an error in calculation which he later, tormentedly, covered up. The metric system was a radical concept (pre-Revolution France contained "a staggering 250,000 different units of weights and measures"), a populist system devised for the people. Alder is a witty writer (the astronomer and philosopher Lalande is described as having an "eggplant-shaped skull"), and The Measure of All Things is necessary reading for both pop-science buffs and Francophiles. It's probably worth noting that Mechain and Delambre (not to mention Thomas Jefferson) would indeed find it incomprehensible that the biggest superpower ever still doesn't use the metric system. Even Ireland is changing over, for God's sake...

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