The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth [Paperback]

Cherry Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0521893127 | ISBN-13: 978-0521893121

How old is the Earth? At the end of the nineteenth century, scientists were all looking for a clock that would provide an answer to this, the greatest Time question of all. The Dating Game tells the story of one man's vision of developing a geological timescale, a great vision which lasted fifty years despite scientific opposition, financial hardship and personal tragedy. Arthur Holmes fought to convince The Establishment of an Earth of great antiquity: a fight which eventually transformed the moribund 'art' of geology into a dynamic science.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Textbooks tell us that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and that the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Just as our understanding of human history is helped by dates, so the history of the Earth and life of the geological past have also been dated by scientists. Most people have heard of radiocarbon dating, which can be used to date archaeological materials up to 50,000 years old, but how is it possible to put a date to a rock? It was only a couple of hundred years ago that many scientists still believed that the Earth was 6,000 years old, a figure calculated by Archbishop Ussher in 1650 from biblical chronology.

In The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth, Cherry Lewis tells the fascinating story of how the rocks of the Earth came to be dated and of the role played by the English geologist Arthur Holmes in the intellectual and practical struggle to do so. You do not need to know any science to appreciate the remarkable and protracted effort by Holmes and his colleagues to discover how to measure time in rocks. They were using the same principles as those of radiocarbon dating; namely, the radioactive decay of certain elements that naturally occur in rocks. At one time Holmes became a shopkeeper to earn enough money before being able to return to his research. And then money for research in Britain was in such short supply that Holmes had to make a special plea to the university authorities for 74 pounds and 8 shillings for an electronic calculator to help speed up his work.

As a trained geologist, Lewis knows her subject. Although it is her first book, she tells the story well, making the technical details digestible by weaving them around Arthur Holmes's life story, so that they are accessible for the general reader. Diagrams, photographs, and a bibliography help make The Dating Game useful as well as enjoyable. --Douglas Palmer, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lewis's sketch of Arthur Holmes's (1890-1965) life and work captures a fascinating period of scientific achievement and recovers the accomplishments of a neglected thinker. The young Holmes was enamored of natural history and geology. As an adolescent, he eagerly followed the debates over the age of the Earth between the leading but aged physicist Lord Kelvin and his opponents, much younger scientists using radioactivity for dating. By age 21, Holmes had engaged in numerous experiments, seeking to perfect uranium-lead dating for determining the ages of rocks. Soon he used his research to gauge the Earth's age, and at 23, he wrote a seminal work, The Age of the Earth, in which he argued that the planet was 1.6 billion years old, refuting Kelvin's earlier estimate of 20 million years; later Holmes dated the Earth at 3.35 billion years. Eventually, as a professor of geology at Edinburgh University, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of producing a geological time scale that ordered the temporal ages of the Earth from the Cambrian period to the Pleistocene epoch. In his 1944 (and still used) book, Principles of Physical Geology, Holmes detailed these ideas and also proposed a theory of continental drift that challenged the reigning idea of a onetime land bridge. In due time, Holmes's conclusions about the Earth's age and plate tectonics were accepted into the scientific canon, even though, as Lewis, a British petroleum scientist, argues, he seldom receives credit. Science fans will appreciate Lewis's fast-paced biography tracing the evolution of Holmes's genius, the often hostile and sometimes divisive character of the scientific community and the quest to discover the age of the Earth. 44 illus. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521893127
• ISBN-13: 978-0521893121
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,977,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good biography of a scientific giant, November 18, 2000

By 

Robert J. Stern "Bobdadbob" (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth (Hardcover)

This is a fine read, well-written and researched. Holmes is a personal hero of mine and I was thrilled to see a biography about him. I learned a lot of things about him that I never knew, including where he got his fascination with E. Africa, his time with an oil company, and how he struggled to get an academic post (the vignette about his curio shop should provide inspiration to all young geologists struggling for their first academic job. Ms. Lewis does a good job of presenting Holmes, warts and all, including his somewhat unsavory dalliance with Doris Reynolds (nepotism is always with us). The author does a great job of capturing the excitement of young Holmes learning about the unfolding mysteries of radioactivity and his efforts to apply this revolution to understanding earth processes and history. There are lots of photos, I wish there were more. The only bone that I have to pick with the author is that Kelvin's true motivation for concluding the earth must be young is not presented early enough. Yes, evolution called for lots of time, but the sun screamed louder to the physicists that little time could have had elapsed. How could the sun have remained so brilliantly hot if it were as ancient as Darwin thought the earth must be? No one could imagine that the sun could produce its energy by nuclear fusion, a concept that wasn't dreamed of until well into the 20th century. Its heat must come from burning something and this combustion could not go on for long. Kelvin was right to conclude that because the sun must be young, so must the earth.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wondeful read, November 9, 2000

By 

Joseph Meert (Battle Creek, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth (Hardcover)

I read this book on my way from London to Edinburgh (and the return) trip. Although such a read might add to the cost of the book, I highly recommend doing the same thing since you can trace some of Holme's history as well! The book discusses the struggles of Arthur Holmes to establish geochronology as a legitimate science and to establish the age of the Earth. The scientific struggles are intertwined with a discussion of Holme's personal struggles and the reader truly gets a sense of scientific history throughout the book. It is interesting for other reasons as well. The book helps explain the source of many young earth creationist arguments against radiometric dating. These 'modern' creationists are merely recycling old arguments that Holmes and colleagues scientifically dismissed during the establishment of modern mass spectrometry. If you never understood the rigors and challenges of modern science this book will enlighten you as well. Cherry Lewis does a wonderful job explaining the rigors of peer-review and the difficulty in establishing a new paradigm.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but could have been even shorter!, October 27, 2001

By 

Joan Roch (Montréal, Qc Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth (Hardcover)

The book is quite good, and I learned quite a lot (I don't know much anyway) about geology and planetology. But, the story of Mr. Holmes is not that interesting. Especially the 50 pages about his trip in Africa! Puh-leez! I love reading about the history of scientific discoveries, and I would have prefered more pages on the rejection of the continental drift theory.