46

Okay, I really am still stuck listening to Utada. As of now, I'm watching a youtube video of Utada and Beckham. No, I'm not watching it when I am doing something that requires my full attention, such as the paraphrase of the book.

Paraphrase:
So, first of all we go back to Newton's work, and how it affected the calculation of the earth's circumference and other things like that. His laws demonstrated that the earth is not really perfectly circular, but is like an oval. That was a huge shock to pretty much everybody, as nobody ever seemed to doubt that the earth was spherical. This threw pretty much all calculations of the earth out of porportion.
In England, there was one scientist, who walked all the way from the Tower of London to York, using a chain to figure out exactly the distance between two consecutive degrees. Most people would think that this was very inaccurate, but was off only by 600 yards when his calculations were extended across the globe!
Later on, the French began to become very interested in the idea of finding out the globe's circumference.