Why is the scientific community so unifiedamp10amp10In the last 350odd years the international scientific community has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action especially in the face of two global crises disastrous climate change and a deadly pandemic. How did amp8220the scientific communityamp8221 come into existence and why does it workamp10amp10Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview from the late seventeenth to the early twentyfirst centuries through the creation of two enormous projectsthe Carte du Ciel or the great star map and the International Cloud Atlas pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.amp10amp10Drawing upon original documents stored in Paris Geneva and Uppsala historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a fascinating lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations. Rivals is indispensable both as history and as guidance.