Description:
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
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