"Science acknowledges no shame": Asking the Earth her age (Rock Off entry)
Written: Jul 23 '01 (Updated Jul 24 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Lively account of important breakthroughs in recent geology.
Cons: Cutting more than two chapters wouldn't hurt the narrative. No index.
The Bottom Line: Author Cherry Lewis' emphasis on Arthur Holmes' pioneering geological research is illuminating and engaging. Her descriptions of his life are less so.
eplovejoy's Full Review: Cherry Lewis - The Dating Game: One Man's Search f...
A nice feature of The Dating Game is that everyone wins.
The geologists who worked to determine the Earth's age won because their efforts yielded an answer that is important also in astronomy and other fields. The rest of us won because their answer -- Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old -- gave the human race a greater understanding of our home planet and of ourselves. And readers of Cherry Lewis' history -- subtitled One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth -- win as well because we get her crisp, informative account of some of the most important research of the past century, plus an introduction to one of the most important contributors to that science.
Early in her enthusiastic chronicle, Lewis sketches the late 19th century in which the ideas that paved the way for 20th century science were conceived. It was an era of unprecedented discovery, an age in which breakthroughs were being made in every area of inquiry. Debates among scientists were passionate, even personal. People who believed in a God viewed many of the new theories as attacks, assaults to knock the Lord from His throne. And scientists whose observations warred with the teachings of their faiths tried mightily to reconcile the two.
Geologists knew vaguely how old rocks are, but Lewis likens their understanding to that of a historian who has no dates to mark events. Without dates, we might know that the Roman occupation of Britain ended before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but we wouldn't know whether it happened very long before or not so long before. It was that way with geology, in which it was apparent some fossils are older than others, but not at all clear how much older.
In the late 18th century, James Hutton disproved the idea that Noah's flood placed fossils on mountain tops. William Smith noticed that rock strata form a chronology that can be read with as much certainty as one reads the ordered chapters in a book. Charles Lyell's studies of the layers of Sicily's Mount Etna led him to realize the volcano must be at least hundreds of thousands of years old. This suggested to Charles Darwin that the Earth is old enough for his theoretical evolution to have had time to unfold.
But many people, scientists included, clung to the accepted Biblical age of the Earth: 6,000 years. Such scholars as Philip Gosse contended that the Bible's teaching are accurate and that anything older than 6,000 years is that age because God created it to be old when the Earth was young. Among some scientists, the Bible's age had begun to give way to an answer that made the world significantly older.
But this new idea that the Earth's age is less than 100 million years and probably only about 20 million years became dogma of its own by the beginning of the 20th century. It was defended vigorously by such stalwarts as Lord William Kelvin, whose definitive work in thermodynamics made him a formidable force to anyone proposing alternate theories. As awesome as Kelvin's reputation was, a few scientists braved challenging him in public, as in a letter in London's The Times newspaper in which a younger researcher suggested that the older man's "brilliantly original mind has not always submitted patiently to the task of assimilating the work of others by the process of reading."
Several young men followed that lengthy exchange of letters avidly, among them Arthur Holmes (1890 - 1965), whose pioneering work would help lead to the determination of Earth's age and to wide acceptance of "continental drift." Holmes was one of the first to recognize that accepted methods for guessing the Earth's age -- including measuring the oceans' salinity or the accumulation of sediment -- were too variable.
When others were excited about the potential medical applications of the "mysterious rays" that Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, were studying, Holmes recognized that this radiation was the key to measuring geological time and to determining the age of the Earth. Holmes' work with radiation was adapted by scientists outside of geology, notably George Lemaitre, who incorporated some of Holmes' research into his early version of the Big Bang theory in the 1930s.
Although it is Claire Patterson who is credited with determining in the 1950s that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old (the sophisticated equipment and large budget he had at his disposal because of the Manhattan Project gave him a tremendous advantage over Holmes), it is Holmes who laid the foundation. Patterson calls Holmes' work "outstandingly inspirational and ingenious."
Lewis traces the developments from early to modern geology with eagerness and verve. Her enthusiasm for the subject is clear, and it would be even without the exclamation points of which she is quite fond. But her narrative sometimes veers off track when she describes details about the life of a scientist whose ideas are more extraordinary and interesting than his life. The important portions of Holmes' biography could be included in a few well-placed parenthetical observations.
He was raised in late-Victorian England when the nation prized education. A trip over several months to find minerals in Mozambique left him with a lifelong weakness brought on by malaria, which kept him out of active military duty in World War I. He developed alternative fertilizers that helped Great Britain survive when the war cut off German supplies. He married Margaret Howe and although they were not well suited for each other, they had a son, who died of disease early in childhood. Holmes had an affair with the noted geologist Doris L. Reynolds, whom he married shortly after his first wife died. Their affair cost him his position as head of the geology department at England's Durham University, but his international renown won him a better position at Edinburgh University. He lived long enough to bask in the accolades of colleagues grateful for his inspiration and his groundbreaking research.
Lewis, however, includes much detail about Holmes that is -- one hopes this is not harsh -- extraneous. The worst excess is in two chapters that one can skip entirely without missing anything important. "Holidays in Mozambique" and "This Vegetable Prison" recount several months Holmes spent in Africa as a young man looking for mineral wealth that he did not find. The chapters are not entirely uninteresting, especially because long sections of them are told in Holmes' own words, through letters to his family and his journal. But Holmes' time in Mozambique did nothing except sharpen his enthusiasm for ideas he'd already formulated at home. If one skips the two chapters, the introduction of his first wife at the start of the next might seem sudden, but it is as abrupt to anyone who reads them.
If Lewis had cut back on her descriptions of Holmes' life, she would have eliminated the book's most serious flaw. Some of his correspondence and other records were not preserved and so Lewis is often forced to speculate. Her guesses might seem sound, and she signals them with such phrases as "Holmes almost certainly . . ." or "Holmes would have . . . ." But the tone of such speculation is in jarring contrast to Holmes' demand for detail and documentation. The remainder of Lewis' account is so interesting that one can forgive such lapses, but the book would be more enjoyable if one didn't have to do so.
In the early 19th century, James Hutton guessed that the geological evidence for the age of the Earth offers "no vestige of a beginning." Holmes took his inspiration from Hutton and other trailblazers and proved that there is indeed a beginning, but it is so far beyond what had been guessed as to be staggering. And he maintained a sense of personal perspective in the face of ages beyond imagining. A year before he died, Holmes said, "Looking back it is a slight consolation for the disabilities of growing old to notice that the Earth has grown older much more rapidly than I have -- from about six thousand years when I was ten, to four or five billion years by the time I reached sixty."
Holmes put all the extra candles on the planet's birthday cake, but Lewis' The Dating Game ensures that it is we who enjoy the gift.
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This is an entry in the Rock Off organized by Epinions' science wiz, Hypotenuse, and the site's chief geologist, scmrak. The Web page for the write-off is at:
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