Measuring the World

Two German scientists, born the same decade, are bent on the same unsolved problem: how large the world is, and how anyone could prove it. Detlev Buck follows Alexander von Humboldt (Albrecht Schuch), who goes out to measure it by travel, and Carl Friedrich Gauß (Florian David Fitz), who stays home and measures it with numbers. Between them runs the question of whether the world is found by going to it or by thinking about it.