The Mapmaker's Wife Read Online Free PDF

scientific information, and the Newtonian ideas that did filter into Paris had to compete with a variety of other ponderings on the earth’s shape. In 1691, Samuel Eisenschmidt, a famous astronomer from Strasbourg, concluded in his Treatise of the Figure of the Earth that the earth was a“spheroid prolonged toward the poles,” similar to what the French believed. Thomas Burnet, an Englishman, published his Sacred Theory of the Earth shortly afterward, and he agreed with Eisenschmidt. Such differing theories subsequently served as a catalyst for the academy’s measurement of a meridian throughout the whole of France, but that lengthy effort—as Cassini happily reported in 1718—proved that Newton was wrong.
    Nor were the academy members swayed by the supporting bits of evidence that Newton had called upon. The fact that Jupiter was flattened at the poles was not seen as particularly relevant. The physics that governed the “supralunar” world—the heavens beyond the moon—were not believed to be the same as those thatgoverned the sublunar world of the earth and its orbiting satellite. This distinction between supralunar and sublunar realms went all the way back to the Greeks. The academy members also had an explanation for Richer’s pendulum experiment. Differences in temperature that led metal to shrink or expand were thought to be at fault. Either that, or poor work on Richer’s part:“It is suspected that this resulted from some error in the observations,” Cassini sniffed. Even more telling, Newton was at a loss to offer a mechanical explanation for how this force of gravity might work. The Cartesians had developed a rational, understandable explanation for the universe: a fluidlike ether that pushed on orbiting planets. All Newton had come up with was a mathematical formula, one that seemed to require the invisible hand of God, reaching across vast regions. The idea of attraction at such distances, Huygens wrote in a letter to Newton, was“absurd.”
    Indeed, if one wanted to know the shape of the earth, and one had to choose between the concrete measurements of the French and the obscure mathematics of an Englishman, how could anyone doubt which presented a stronger case?“It is obvious,” Fontenelle declared, “that the current measurements, which are the refinement of Cassini’s work, must be preferred to the result of geometrical theories based on a very small number of very simple assumptions, which are isolated from all the complications of physics and reality.” Even the great Belgian mathematician, Johann Bernoulli, complained that Newton’s theories relating to the shape of the earth were little better than“gibberish.” “I tried to understand it,” he wrote in a letter to one of his students. “I read and reread what he had to say concerning the subject, but I could not understand a thing. All I found was obscurity and impenetrability.”
    Yet Newtonian physics would not go away. In 1713, France, England, and Holland signed the Treaty of Utrecht, which brought an end to the War of the Spanish Succession and ushered in a thirty-year period of peace that encouraged the sharing of scientific ideas throughout Europe. Huguenots living in England helpedspeed this intellectual exchange. More than 200,000 French Protestants had fled France following a 1685 edict that deemed Protestantism heretical, and they busily published works in French that were designed to open up Catholic France to outside influences. In 1725, John Theophilus Desaguliers, a Huguenot refugee and experimental physicist, took up the Newtonian cause by publishing a blistering critique of Cassini’s measurements in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. He dismissed Cassini’s work as so sloppily done that it could not possibly raise questions about the elegant theories of Newton. Debate over the shape of the earth and Newtonian physics had moved to center stage in European science. It was the first