San Antonio College Library

The debate over the age of the Earth has been ongoing for over two thousand years, and has pitted physicists and astronomers against biologists, religious philosophers against geologists. The Chronologers' Quest tells the story of our attempts to determine the age of the Earth. This book investigates the many novel methods used in the search for the Earth's age, from James Ussher and John Lightfoot examining biblical chronologies, Comte de Buffon...

"In Nature's Clocks, Doug Macdougall tells the story of scientists seeking to understand the past and shows how they arrived at the ingenious techniques they use to determine the age of objects and organisms. Focusing on radiocarbon (C-14) dating - the best-known of these methods and the only one that can directly date once-living material - and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the past century's...

Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists came to accept four counterintuitive yet fundamental facts about the Earth: deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact, and global warming. When first suggested, each proposition violated scientific orthodoxy and was quickly denounced as scientific - and sometimes religious - heresy. Nevertheless, after decades of rejection, new data persuaded scientists to change their minds. The stories behind...

Explains why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to planetary survival and offers suggestions for how to create a more time-literate society. "Why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival: Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of...