The Greenwich Meridian is in the wrong place

Future Steve is still cold.

Can't wait for Steve's explanation using a 2D model

A quick note on the former Paris meridian: France accepted the swap to the Greenwich meridian on condition that the UK would go full metric. Which is still not completed.

Steve finding the future-past-thing silly, and Matt not being bothered by Steve finding it silly, is just a joy to see

A Parker Meridian

if i could leave it zero stars, i would not. i would leave it -0.0014333 stars.

I will NEVER get tired of the past-Matt/future-Matt schtick. Well done for dragging Steve into it too

8:00 "We'll assume they're infinitely far away." Early astronomers actually tried to determine the movement of the stars (Tycho Brahe comes to mind), but their equipment was not sufficiently precise to measure any change at all, so they concluded that the stars were in fact effectively infinitely far away.

"You can contribute to the problem by preordering" is now my favourite Matt's quote.

"Harrison made some clocks" is one of the greatest understatments ever made scientifically, artistically, and engineering-ly. Well done Matt. 15:40

I love how much of a kick you get out of doing the future/past bit and how its like a running joke on the channel. You need to somehow include a future/past Matt across two different videos, something that doesn't fully make sense in the first video but the joke is finished in the next video.

Steve is being such a good sport pretending that most of this is new to him to help the narrative of the video. Matt giving him credit for previous related work. This is friendly YouTube collaboration at its best.

We need a petition to call it the Parker Meridian

so nice for Steve to join smaller channels for a collab.

Wow, this is the first time I finally understood exactly why knowing the time while was so important while sailing!

Fun fact - my software is used to drive the Great Equatorial Telescope in the "Onion Dome". I feel like I'm right up there with Flamsteed and Halley!

There's a survey marker in Wisconsin at 90 deg west, 45 deg north. Except...it's just a tourist thing in completely the wrong place. The actual confluence is a few hundred meters away in the middle of a farmer's field.

The need to define local down reminds me of my personal favourite scientific experiment, the Schiehallion experiment of 1774. It was an attempt to measure the Earth's average density. The idea was to calculate the mass of a mountain, Schiehallion in Scotland, and the location of its centre of mass. Then to see how much the gravitational attraction of the mountain moved a pendulum. In order to achieve this absolute down relative to the rotation of the earth had to be determined. To this end two obsevatories were built on opposite sides of the mountain. It is one of the first times stellar aboration had to be used to account for the rotation of the earth and the speed of light. It is also where contour lines were first used in cartography. It could make a great stand up maths video.

I was fortunate enough to get to visit the International Date Line marker in Fiji. As a true nerd would do, I took along my handheld GPS to check it out. I could not measure the deviation between the marker and the GPS reading since, when I walked toward the line, the device froze up completely. Eventually I got it running again by removing the batteries. Some software designer probably forgot to catch the divide by zero exceptions. I was pleased that I wasn't trying to navigate a boat or plane with that version of the software.

Jay Foreman made a great video on the longitude problem!