Book Review: The Great Arc - John Keay
This book invokes two very different reactions in me. The primary reaction is jubilant, almost romantic. The second is gloomy. Imagine you’re watching Oppenheimer: spirits rising until the point the bombs actually drop, after which you feel guilty about having felt good in the first place. The Great Trigonometric Survey was completed over the duration of a better part of a century, across three generations of mathematicians, physicists and surveyors (they were called compasswallahs - I finally see where Rohit Gupta gets his pseudonym), and at the cost of thousands of lives.