re: #301 jcm

They measured the irregularity of the earth’s sphere, they expected a perfect sphere, the difference drove one of them crazy because he could find his “error” and the result is the meter is slight longer than the perfection they sought.

They concluded (mistakenly) that the Earth was an oblate spheroid, i.e, slightly flattened at the poles and slightly bulging at the equator. In the 1960s, satellite measurements (GEOS Program) showed that the Earth is, in fact, slightly “pear-shaped”, with variation below the “ideal sphere” at the South Pole and at the mid-northern latitudes (between 35 and 60 North), and “bulging” above the ideal at the North Pole and the mid-southern latitudes (35 to 60, again).

The actual difference from the “ideal”, however, is nowhere more than 25 to 50 feet; not a lot on a “spheroid” nearly 8,000 miles in diameter. Just enough to throw off the original calculations, in other words.

Mathematics can achieve perfection; reality rarely bothers to try.

/Good reality. Smart reality.

cheers

eon