What is Reddit's opinion of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time?

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Read Longitude by Dava Sobel for an excellent history of the development of an accurate clock that could be used at sea. It's truly fascinating both from the engineering perspective as well as the personalities involved. And it clarifies that, prior to this development, navigation at sea (at least in terms of longitude position) could best be characterized as a wild ass guess.

Edit: somehow wrote LATitude when I meant LONGitude! Duh!

Here’s a great book about the mechanical clock revolutionized ocean navigation:

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://smile.amazon.com/dp/080271529X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_5M3X25QDZW616QB2ST23

Yes and no. Finding what way is north, super easy, people have been doing it for thousands of years. Finding latitude (how far north or south you are) , also very easy and based on how far above the horizon the north star is. Finding latitude is the hard part that requires those things I mentioned.

Here is a book about the history of celestial navigation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/080271529X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_gYc-FbZZ2Q2CF

Longitude by Dave Sobel

A book about how modern navigation was made possible through solving a seemingly impossible problem namely determining the longitude. At the time the solution was thought to be astronomy and the scientific community ignored the simple solution through watchmaking developed by a single man. A nice David vs. Goliath story about a guy fighting to be recognised for a simple mechanical solution to a problem thought to be impossible.

While we're talking navigation, another good read is Longitude. Figuring one's latitude is a relatively easy problem - all you need is the sun. Longitude is much harder because it' sale relative to what you want to call 0 degrees longitude, and you need accurate timepieces. Getting something to keep accurate time on a swaying ship? Hard.

It should be known that ALL sea explorers (including Magellan) before the late 18th century were sailing willy nilly and were all essentially lucky idiots. They had no means of calculating longitude. They knew how north they were, but not how far east/west they were. Think about it, you can tell how far north you are by the stars and the length of day, but the since the earth rotates, how do you know how far west you are? The length of day at 40N for example, is the same length of time off the coast of Spain, as it is in the middle of the Atlantic, and also off the coast of New York.

With the increased amount of sea travel in the 1700s, losses from not knowing Longitude were becoming catastrophic. After losing thousands of men to shallow seas, The King of England issues a bounty on discovering longitude. And that's how the accurate pocketwatch (chronometer) was invented (it was the size of a dvd). With a proper clock sailors could FINALLY keep track of where they were. The clock was set on GMT, and by knowing what time sunrise and sunset was in London, however much later the sun set for them was how far they were away from the Prime Meridian and GMT. This is why lat and long degrees are giving in minutes and seconds.

Check out this book if you wanna know more. I love nautical history. http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X/

Away from land, people got lost a lot. For a long time we knew latitude using the stars, but longitude was a problem until the 18th century when the chronometer was invented.

This is a great book that probably answers your question in more detail:

https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X

>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 centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.
Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.

Longitude By Dava Sobel doesn't cover the whole history of watches, but provides a fascinating and entertaining telling of how and why we have marine chronometers.

Dava Sobel’s book Latitude is an excellent account of this event. I highly recommend it and have gifted it to quite a few people.

https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X/ref=nodl_

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://www.amazon.com/dp/080271529X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_FHG7M02WTGDFP9K9BBK0.

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next Series 6 books: The Eyre Affair / Lost In a Good Book / Well Of Lost Plots / Something Rotten / First Among Sequels / On https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FEGAKBO/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_NW3QCSNRYE3F95ZZNJ93

Seeing Further https://www.amazon.com/dp/000830162X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_V8PSMRK5M90Z2M8FDGAN

There is a good book and BBC series about Harrison and the troubles he went through making the marine chronometer.

In turn, thank you for your reply. I would say this has been very interesting, albeit somewhat disquieting.

With regards to your first objection, forgive something of a tangent here, I'm reminded of a fascinating book on the history of early navigation: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (how's that for a title!). Now, to be fair, this is rather temporizing the metaphor, but my impression is that you're incorrect; absent any fixed point, you can't plot your location.

The problem with ships on the water is, of course, that the water itself moves. Very briefly, the longitude problem springs from the fact that it's (relatively) easy to gauge your location along the North-South axis (latitude), by using astronomical instruments to measure the angle of the Sun's passage through the sky or particular constellations. I'll quote the book description to explain the "longitude problem" (emphasis mine);

> 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 centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.

Just to be clear, really interesting and accessible book, even though it's fundamentally the story of a guy inventing a particular type of clock. The importance to the metaphor is the reality that navigation fundamentally depends on the existence of fixed points.

Which brings us back to the original discussion: my fundamental point is that Right and Left have certain essential, motivating principles. That like the Sunrise defining the East and Sunset defining the West, these exist outside of the parties that are being measured or discussed.

What's so interesting is that going back up the comment chain, our first interaction was me challenging a simple statement of yours, "That’s the opposite of the way the Overton window has shifted in the U.S." This was, in turn, your objection to the claim that "the goal posts just moved so far that all of us sane moderate and left of center people just got moved to the right."

Now let's step back for a second. I brought up my way of evaluating politics (which I called Objective Measurement) in contrast to your way (which I tentatively labeled Relative Measurement), because taking a "Right as East" position (as I do) would seem (to me) to make your assertion unsupportable.

See, that's the thing: if one accepts my assertion of my own conception of an essential quality of the Right ("That government is best which governs least"), then I think you would yourself agree that the "Overton window" has clearly shifted away from the concept of a limited government with clearly enumerated powers, correct?

It's also very important for me to note something: a number of times you've used the term "conservative" as if it were a synonym for the Right, it isn't. As (if I recall correctly) Samuel Huntington noted, the political terms "conservative" and "radical" have no inherent content, only contextual content. Put another way; a Conservative in the USA and a Conservative in Iran are both motivated by the desire to maintain the results of a revolution. It's just that the content of their respective revolutions are wholly different and incompatible. It's why using other "conservative parties" to engage in relative evaluation is so misleading; an American TEA party member and an English Monarchist can (in certain respects) be both called "conservative", but their views are not reconcilable.

So, when you said that we had "a supposedly left-leaning political party that acts more like conservative light", you're not wrong about the conservative part: the Democratic party is absolutely devoted to conserving the (IMO ill gotten) gains of the Progressive era.

I would even go so far as to say that the era of a "Conservative" Right is over: the ideal of our founders has been so corrupted, so perverted, by a century of "progress" that there is next to nothing left to actually conserve. I would argue that this generation is going to be marked by the ascendancy of 'Radicals' on the Right; that is, people who argue that the existing status quo is incompatible with the Constitution and the vision of the founders.

A final point in this already way too long reply: your noting about military spending is well taken, and there is no doubt about waste, but there is also the nuance of the "governs least" in the above Thomas Paine quote. In the Western (Christian) context, the Right isn't a position in favor of the abolition of government, but for the reduction of government to only those areas of power that are fundamental to the state.

This is actually a very important rhetorical point: when someone argues for smaller government, pointing out that they support a wasteful military budget is valid so far as the waste is concerned. Where it fails is when the example of the military is used to justify the State being involved in another area (Healthcare, for example).

It's not an example of hypocrisy or a betrayal of intentions to smaller government to support the existence of a military budget, for the military is a morally unique institution. It stands alone among all functions of the Western State. After all, fundamentally the military is simply the people paid to kill on behalf of the nation. If there is an argument for devolving such a function into the private market, it lies outside the Western tradition.

Anyway, this has been very fun. It's nice to actually discuss ideas for a change, as opposed to the normal noise that seems to characterize so much in politics these days. I apologize in advance, as I'm unlikely to be able to reply further; the Jewish Sabbath begins soon and after it's over I'm usually scrambling to catch up on other things. So I wish you well, and have a good weekend!

Available to read for free right now in Kindle Unlimited.

Also dramatized into a 2-part TV movie in 2000.

Here is a book that deals with Harrison's work.

https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X

Would that be related to how hard it was to make the almost perfect mechanical clock?