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 the
Hardcover
edition.
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 the
Hardcover
edition.
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