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We spoke to Professor Clancey about Ken Adler's 'The Measure of All Things: The Seven Year Odyssey that Transformed the World'

Q : What's so interesting about the history of the meter? How can anyone write over 400 pages about it?
A : It turns out that the meter is a product of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries wanted to throw out all tradition and custom, and base society on 'natural laws'. France had hundreds of different, local measuring systems, as did every country. French scientists and politicians decided to replace them all by a measure based in nature. The meter would be one ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Because it was based on nature, they reasoned, it would be adopted by the whole human race, not just France. And that utopian project was incredibly successful: the meter's now used, officially, in every country except three - the US, Myanmar and Liberia.

Q : How could they measure the distance between the North Pole and the Equator?
A : They couldn't, but it turns out that if you measure about 10%, you can calculate the whole distance, because the earth curves and they're measuring an arc - a segment of a circle. So they set out to measure France from top to bottom, and a little bit of Spain. But just as they began - one scientist going north from Paris and one going South - the Revolution broke out. What started as a peaceful scientific expedition became an adventure story. And that's what the book is about - it follows the separate journeys of two scientists as they conduct the most painstaking and ambitious scientific project ever undertaken up till then, but in the midst of the complete social chaos of war and revolution.

The contrast between what they were attempting to do and what was happening around them was extreme. But on the other hand, without a Revolution, there would probably have never been a meter. The meter was itself a revolution.

Q : What happened to them?
A : Everything you can imagine. Because they carried strange surveying instruments, they were considered spies in some places and thrown in prison. In Paris many of the best French scientists were then being guillotined, so they had to navigate shifting political winds. They also had to take their measurements from high places, like church steeples, and forts, but the revolutionaries were pulling down churches and the forts were sometimes under siege, so everything had to be negotiated Once they were surveying between mountain ranges while a battle raged in the valley between them. But the generals on both sides gave them passage in this instance because they successfully argued that it was for the sake of science. You could still make that argument then: that science and war were separate.

Q : The book also reveals, doesn't it, that there is a secret mistake in the meter, one which has never been corrected?
A : Right, the author, Ken Alder, creates some mystery and anticipation in the introduction by revealing that the meter is in error, that the error was covered up by the surveyor who made it, and that he's the first to discover a sealed box of letters which explain the whole incident. One of the scientists took a mistaken measurement from a fortress in Barcelona, Spain, but on realizing his error, he couldn't go back and correct it because Spain and France were at war, and he was French.

So he returned to Paris consumed with guilt, but too worried about his reputation to reveal the mistake. Eventually his mistake was discovered by others, but by that time the meter had been set, and its never been changed. Scientists long knew about the mistake, but Alder was the first to read the surveyor's own explanations, describing in detail what happened, and showing that he was so haunted by it that he was driven almost mad. Eventually the man died trying to correct the mistake. But it never has been corrected and likely never will. The meter we have has now become customary - a tradition - which is ironic because the whole point was to overthrow custom by appealing directly to nature. As we now know, however, nature turns out not to be as exact as unchanging or capable of being measured as 18th century scientists wanted it to be.

And Professor Clancey says: "I like this because we often assume, incorrectly, that scientific revolutions take place in periods or circumstances of calmness and placidity.

In fact its often been the opposite. Wars, revolutions, and generally unsettled times have often been productive of great changes in the way we see nature."

Deepika Shetty is a Producer with Prime Time Morning and takes care of the book segment 'Off The Shelf' as well.