Soul of the World

Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney Page B

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Authors: Christopher Dewdney
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this at sea, since the wave-induced rolling motion of boats stymied their workings. It was such a long-standing problem that many ships’ navigators simply sailed due south until they reached the correct latitude, then sailed due west or east. Needless to say these were not direct routes.
    John Harrison took up the challenge, not just because of the extraordinary prize but also to save lives. He laboured for twenty-seven years, building successively more accurate clocks until his crowning achievement: the No. 4 Chronometer, which was tested on a voyage between Britain and Jamaica in 1761. It was able to maintain its accuracy during the entire voyage. He won the prize.
    As a practical monument to his achievement, the Greenwich Observatory in England installed its famous time ball at the top of a tower visible to all boats in the adjacent harbour. When the ball dropped, it marked the precise hour, and maritime navigators would synchronize their ship’s clock with the Greenwich master clock. Knowing where you were depended on knowing what time it was.
    M ILLISECONDS , N ANOSECONDS AND C OASTLINES
The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the
    modern industrial age.
    — Lewis Mumford
    Imagine that you have been hired to measure a small nation’s coastline. It’s a big job, but you have enthusiastic assistant surveyors, an unlimited budget and a whole summer ahead of you. You begin the survey one sunny May morning at the southernmost point of the coast, right at the border. The guards on the other side wave to you, and seagulls cry as they hover on a brisk, onshore breeze. The ocean is deep blue and dotted with whitecaps. North of you is a long, white beach. You begin your work.
    The beach is relatively straight and quick to measure. It turns out to be almost two miles long. You break for an early lunch. The survey crew is talkative and excited. You decide that one summer should be ample time to measure the whole shoreline.
    After lunch you begin to survey the point that shelters the beach’s north end. Here you realize that you will have to simplify your measurements. Instead of measuring the gradual curve of the point, you take a series of locations around it and measure the distance between them. It’s sort of cheating, but then again, how far off the actual distance could it be? Probably not a significant amount. Measuring the point takes up the early part of the afternoon, and as you and your crew come around to the other side, you see that the shoreline extending north is nowhere near as straight as the beach you measured in the morning. It is a long series of successive points, bays and inlets, some large, some small.
    The first bay is simple, though it contains a small point that, after a brief conference, you and your assistants elect not to measure. “It’stoo small,” you say. The next point has a little bay in it, perhaps only twenty feet across. If you measure the bay, it will extend the length of the shoreline by almost a hundred feet. But a decision has to be made. In the end you decide that all smaller features will be ignored. If you begin to measure every little bay and inlet, the job might take all year.
    When you’ve finished for the day, you and your crew set up camp on the beach. After dinner, under the stars and around a driftwood fire, everyone talks about the day’s work. The conversation is lively and friendly at first, but then the discussion turns into an argument. One of the surveyors, a philosophy student, insists that the survey has to be done as conscientiously as possible. She didn’t like the decision to skip smaller features. “Every little bay and inlet has to be measured,” she insists. “There is an absolute length to the shoreline, and we’re being paid to measure it.”
    “Hold on,” says the lead surveyor. He has a degree in mathematics and works for the department of national cartography. “Where do we stop? Let’s say we measure a small bay and it comes to

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