Aeons: The Search for the Beginning of Time - Hardcover

Gorst, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841151173 ISBN 13: 9781841151175

Verlag: Fourth Estate, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The full story of man’s attempt to discover the moment that time began, from James Ussher’s confident assertion in 1650 that the world was 5,654 years old to the Hubble Space telescope’s images of a world 13 billion years old, with a starry cast of eccentrics, mystics, scientists and visonaries.

The moment of the beginning of time is one of science’s Holy Grails, pursued by devotees and obsessives across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher who lost his sight in his 50 year quest, laboriously outlined in his 2000 Latin pages of Annals – a chronology of all known history – that is now famous only for one spectacularly inaccurate date: 4004BC, the creation of the world. Theology failed Ussher, just as it thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many others before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time: the Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled came up with age of 74,832 years even though he suspected this was far too little. Biology had a go in the eighteenth century in the hands of Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged that a fossil he had found was of a man at the time of Noah’s flood; regrettably what he had was a large salamander. And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics and radioactivity – each new discovery being applied to the enduring mystery: when had time begun. Until now where telescopes of remarkable vision offer a glimpse of the answer, but the moment may prove to be indefinable just as we are on the verge of locating it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin Gorst is a writer and director of science documentaries on both sides of the Atlantic, including for the BBC and Channel 4.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

In the beginning was not the word but the date. But what date? When did the world begin? This question strikes at the root of mankind's understanding of the universe, or of the divine scheme of things. In 1650, Bishop James Ussher announced to no one's enormous surprise that the world began in 4004 bc. His date was so widely accepted that it was printed in the King James Bible, a close reading of which had allowed Ussher to make the calculation in the first place. But though his logic was impeccable, his numbers were wrong. Ussher was followed be a sometimes bizarre, always dogged stream of scientists and philosophers, each determined to salcutlate the moment when the world began. edward Lhuyd took his inspiration from the boulders of his native Wales to conclude that the world must be several thousand years older thean Ussher proposed; edward Hailey, the astonomer, suggested that the salinity of the sea might provide the clue to the age of the earth, meanwhile the Comte de Buffon attempted to replicate the cooling of the Earth's core by heating tiny iron balls and comapring their loss of heat. He reckoned the world was 10 million years old.

Darwin needed the world to be old enough to allow evolution, and by the beginning of the twentieth century scientists at last started to think in terms of billions of years. In 1998 two independent teams of astronomers probing the heavens with the Bubble space telescope found what they believe is the final piece in the jigsaw – the decisive evidence that reveals the age of the universe. With a margin error of over a billion years, their result may lack the reassuring precision of Ussher's exact moment of creation but in a final twist to the tale the discovery unveils a universe more startling than anyone imagined. Aeons is the story of science, religion and philosophy, as ever locked in a tense struggle to define and explain the human condition.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Fourth Estate
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841151173
• ISBN 13: 9781841151175
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar