In the mid-fifteen-hundreds, a Swedish peasant named Nils lived on an island called Iggön in the Baltic Sea. He was known to his neighbors as Rich Nils, apparently because of the plenitude of fish in the waters near his home and, even more lucrative, the seals that showed up to hunt them. There was one rock in particular where seals liked to haul themselves out of the ocean to rest and bask in the sun. Nils, for his part, liked to visit this rock with his harpoon.
Eventually, though, Nils noticed that the seals had begun gathering on a lower part of the rock, rather than on the high point, as they once did. It seemed that the water level no longer gave them access to the very top. This was a troubling development for Rich Nils’s income: the high point now obstructed the path of his harpoon when he approached the rock from the shore. Nils used fire to weaken the rock, chipping away at it until he’d not only removed the high point but also lowered the over-all height of the rock, so that seals would be able to rest on it even when the sea reached its lowest level of the year.
Some hundred and eighty years later, the Swedish physicist and mathematician Anders Celsius went looking for Rich Nils’s rock. Celsius was known for his obsession with quantifying the world around him; he tried to calculate the distance between the Earth and the sun, was involved in the long quest to use meridian measurements to determine the size and shape of the Earth, and famously proposed a new scale for gauging temperature. Now he was once again in search of a way to measure what had previously been unmeasurable.
Denne historien er fra August 26, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra August 26, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!
Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.