The French Revolution and the Birth of a Universal Measure It’s 1789 in Paris. The French Revolution is in full swing, heads are rolling (literally), ideas of liberty and reason are electrifying the air, and nothing is off-limits for reform. Amid this upheaval, one very practical problem stood out: weights and measures. Every region and every trade in France seemed
Today, I travel back to the nineteenth century to meet with Pierre-Simon Laplace, a man who imagined a super-intelligence so powerful, it could calculate the entire history and future of the universe.
In eighteenth-century Europe, there was an increase in women entering the field of science, more so than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What happened in the eighteenth century that set women up for success?