Dava Sobel

“[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his…

— Dava Sobel

“With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link…

— Dava Sobel

Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set,…

— Dava Sobel

“He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”

— Dava Sobel

“Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork. Dava Sobel”

— Dava Sobel

“the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix…

— Dava Sobel

“Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to…

— Dava Sobel

“And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer…

— Dava Sobel

And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep…

— Dava Sobel

“As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by…

— Dava Sobel

“There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense…

— Dava Sobel

“To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even…

— Dava Sobel

“In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of “discovering the longitude” became a synonym for attempting the impossible.”

— Dava Sobel

“In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions…

— Dava Sobel

“The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands…

— Dava Sobel

“The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a…

— Dava Sobel

“Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question…

— Dava Sobel

“One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight…

— Dava Sobel