She concludes, ''This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma - one that stumped the wisest minds How to remember that it's the latitudes and not the longitudes that are parallel, one trick is to associate the ''a'' sounds in latitude and parallel.)īut the real difference, as the she notes, is that the zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by nature and is the equator, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude is simply wherever science decides to place it (for more thanĢ00 years at Greenwich, England). Whereas: ''The meridians of longitude go the other way: They loop from the North Pole to the South and back again in great circles of the same size, so they all converge at the ends of the earth.'' (Although Ms. The globe'' in a series of concentric circles that are smaller the farther they are from the equator. Scientific Problem of His Time,'' Dava Sobel writes that ''the trick for remembering the difference'' is that ''the latitude lines, the parallels, really do stay parallel to each other as they girdle Irst, is everyone clear on the difference between longitude and latitude? In her elegant history, ''Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

The Biggest Peril to Ships for Most of History By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT The Biggest Peril to Ships for Most of History

Longitude dava sobel sparknotes