NIST Colloquium Series: The Quest to Measure Longitude
Dava Sobel, a writer of popular expositions on scientific topics, has published works such as Longitude: The True Story of a Long Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time; Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love; ,and The Planets. Her work has also been dramatized for television on the A&E Network. In this program from the NIST Colloquium series, she discusses how navigators and scientist like Galileo and Newton had difficulty keeping track of longitude until an unknown self-educated clockmaker offered timekeeping as the unlikely solution.
Tags: accurate, astronomy, benchmark, clock, clockmaker, colloquium, Dava Sobel, Galileo, Huygens, longitude, measurements, navigation, Newton, NIST, science, stars, timekeeper