5 THE STONE-BREAKERS

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    AT JUST THE time that Henry dish was pleting his experiments in London, fourhundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of cluding moment was about to take placewith the death of James Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news forsce as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton’s work withoutfear of embarrassment.

    Hutton was by all ats a man of the kee insights and liveliest versation, a delightin pany, and without rival when it came to uanding the mysterious slow processesthat shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form thatanyone could begin to uand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all but audiblesigh, “almost entirely i of rhetorical aplishments.” Nearly every line he pennedwas an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory of the Earth withProofs and Illustrations , discussing . . . something:

    The world which we inhabit is posed of the materials, not of the earth whichwas the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in asdingfrom the present, we sider as the third, and which had preceded the land thatwas above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beh the waterof the o.

    Yet almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly, he created the sce of geology andtransformed our uanding of the Earth. Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperousScottish family, and ehe sort of material fort that allowed him to pass much of hislife in a genially expansive round of light work and intellectual betterment. He studiedmedie, but found it not to his liking and turned i, which he followed in arelaxed and stific way on the family estate in Berwickshire. Tiring of field and flock, in1768 he moved to Edinburgh, where he founded a successful business produg salammonia coal soot, and busied himself with various stific pursuits. Edinburgh atthat time was a ter of intellectual vigor, and Hutton luxuriated in its enrig possibilities.

    He became a leading member of a society called the Oyster Club, where he passed hisevenings in the pany of men such as the eist Adam Smith, the chemist JosephBlack, and the philosopher David Hume, as well as such occasional visiting sparks asBenjamin Franklin and James Watt.

    Iradition of the day, Hutton took an i in nearly everything, from mineralogy tometaphysics. He ducted experiments with chemicals, iigated methods of iningand al building, toured salt mines, speculated on the meisms of heredity, collectedfossils, and propouheories on rain, the position of air, and the laws of motion,among much else. But his particular i was geology.

    Among the questions that attracted i in that fanatically inquisitive age was ohathad puzzled people for a very long time—namely, why a clamshells and other marinefossils were so often found on mountaintops. How oh did they get there? Those whothought they had a solution fell into two opposing camps. One group, known as theunists, was vihat everything oh, including seashells in improbably loftyplaces, could be explained by rising and falling sea levels. They believed that mountains,hills, and other features were as old as the Earth itself, and were ged only when watersloshed over them during periods of global flooding.

    Opposing them were the Plutonists, who hat voloes ahquakes, amongother enlivening agents, tinually ged the face of the pla but clearly owed nothing towayward seas. The Plutonists also raised awkward questions about where all the water we wasn’t in flood. If there was enough of it at times to cover the Alps, then where, pray,was it during times of tranquility, such as now? Their belief was that the Earth was subject toprofound internal forces as well as surfaes. However, they couldn’t vingly explainhow all those clamshells got up there.

    It was while puzzling over these matters that Hutton had a series of exceptional insights.

    From looking at his own farmland, he could see that soil was created by the erosion of rod that particles of this soil were tinually washed away and carried off by streams andrivers and redeposited elsewhere. He realized that if such a process were carried to its naturalclusion theh would eventually be worn quite smooth. Yet everywhere around himthere were hills. Clearly there had to be some additional process, some form of renelift, that created new hills and mountains to keep the cycle going. The marine fossils onmountaintops, he decided, had not been deposited during floods, but had risen along with themountains themselves. He also deduced that it was heat within the Earth that created newrocks and tis and thrust up mountain s. It is not too much to say that geologistswouldn’t grasp the full implications of this thought for two hundred years, when finally theyadopted plate teics. Above all, what Hutton’s theories suggested was that Earth processesrequired huge amounts of time, far more than anyone had ever dreamed. There were enoughinsights here to transform utterly our uanding of the Earth.

    In 1785, Hutton worked his ideas up into a long paper, which was read at secutivemeetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It attracted almost no notice at all. It’s not hardto see why. Here, in part, is how he prese to his audience:

    In the one case, the f cause is in the body which is separated; for, after thebody has been actuated by heat, it is by the rea of the proper matter of thebody, that the chasm which stitutes the vein is formed. Iher case, again,the cause is extrinsi relation to the body in which the chasm is formed. Therehas been the most violent fracture and divulsion; but the cause is still to seek; andit appears not in the vein; for it is not every fracture and dislocation of the solidbody of our earth, in which minerals, or the proper substanineral veins,are found.

    Needless to say, almost no one in the audience had the fai idea what he was talkingabout. Enced by his friends to expand his theory, ioug hope that he mightsomehow stumble onto clarity in a more expansive format, Huttohe en yearspreparing his magnum opus, which ublished in two volumes in 1795.

    Together the two books ran to nearly a thousand pages and were, remarkably, worse thaneven his most pessimistic friends had feared. Apart from anything else, nearly half thepleted work now sisted of quotations from French sources, still in the inal French.

    A third volume was so uig that it wasn’t published until 1899, more than a turyafter Hutton’s death, and the fourth and cluding volume was never published at all.

    Hutton’s Theory of the Earth is a strong didate for the least read important book in sce(or at least would be if there weren’t so many others). Even Charles Lyell, the greatestgeologist of the followiury and a man who read everything, admitted he couldn’t getthrough it.

    Luckily Hutton had a Boswell in the form of John Playfair, a professor of mathematics atthe Uy of Edinburgh and a close friend, who could not only write silken prose but—thanks to many years at Hutton’s elbow—actually uood what Hutton was trying to say,most of the time. In 1802, five years after Hutton’s death, Playfair produced a simplifiedexposition of the Huttonian principles, entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian Th<mark></mark>eory of theEarth. The book was gratefully received by those who took an active i in geology,whi 1802 was not a large hat, however, was about to ge. And how.

    In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the FreemasonsTavern at Long Acre, in t Garden, to form a dining club to be called the GeologicalSociety. The idea was to meet once a month to s geologiotions lass or two ofMadeira and a vivial dihe price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty fifteenshillings to disce those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. It soon becameapparent, however, that there was a demand for something more properly institutional, with aperma headquarters, where people could gather to share and discuss new findings. Inbarely a decade membership grew to four huill all gentlemen, of course—and theGeological was threatening to eclipse the Royal as the premier stific society in thetry.

    The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of themwent off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren’t people with a peiary iin minerals, you uand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen withthe wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level. By 1830, therewere 745 of them, and the world would never see the like again.

    It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the eenth tury—positively grippedit—in a way that no sce ever had before or would again. In 1839, when RoderickMurchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rockcalled greywacke, it was an instaseller, rag through four editions, even though it costeight guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable. (As even a Murchisonsupporter ceded, it had “a total want of literary attractiveness.”) And when, in 1841, thegreat Charles Lyell traveled to Am<u></u>erica to give a series of lectures in Boston, selloutaudiences of three thousand at a time packed into the Lowell Institute to hear his tranquilizingdescriptions of maries and seismic perturbations in Campania.

    Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learniuredinto the tryside to do a little “stone-breaking,” as they called it. It ursuit takenseriously, and they teo dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats and dark suits, exceptfor the Reverend William Bud of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his fieldwork in anacademic gown.

    The field attracted maraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison,who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, verting aeronauticallychallenged birds into puffs of driftihers with buckshot, and showing al agilitywhatever beyond that o read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discoveredan i in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geologicalthinking.

    Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of manyprovocative pamphlets with titles like “Revolution without Bloodshed.” In 1794, he licated in a faintly lunatic-sounding spiracy called “the Pop-gun Plot,” in which it lao shoot King Gee III in the neck with a poisoned dart as he sat in his box at thetheater. Parkinson was hauled before the Privy cil for questioning and came within anace of being dispatched in irons to Australia before the charges against him were quietlydropped. Adopting a more servative approach to life, he developed an i in geologyand became one of the founding members of the Geological Society and the author of animportant geological text, anic Remains of a Former World, which remained in print forhalf a tury. He never caused trouble again. Today, however, we remember him for hislandmark study of the affli then called the “shaking palsy,” but known ever since asParkinson’s disease. (Parkinson had oher slight claim to fame. In 1785, he becamepossibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle. The museum,in London’s Leicester Square, had been founded by Sir Ashton Lever, who had driven himselfbankrupt with his urained colleg of natural wonders. Parkinsohe museum until1805, when he could no longer support it and the colle was broken up and sold.)Not quite as remarkable in character but more iial than all the others bined wasCharles Lyell. Lyell was born in the year that Hutton died and only seventy miles away, in thevillage of Kinnordy. Though Scottish by birth, he grew up in the far south of England, in theNew Forest of Hampshire, because his mother was vihat Scots were feckless drunks.

    As was generally the pattern with eenth-tury gentlemen stists, Lyell came from abackground of fortable wealth and intellectual vigor. His father, also named Charles, hadthe unusual distin of being a leading authority on the poet Dante and on mosses.

    (Orthotricium lyelli, which most visitors to the English tryside will at some time have saton, is named for him.) From his father Lyell gained an i in natural history, but it was atOxford, ..where he fell uhe spell of the Reverend William Bud—he of the flowinggowns—that the young Lyell began his lifeloion to geology.

    Bud was a bit of a charming oddity. He had some real achievements, but he isremembered at least as much for his etricities. He articularly noted for a menagerieof wild animals, some large and dangerous, that were allowed to roam through his house andgarden, and for his desire to eat his way through every animal iion. Depending onwhim and availability, guests to Bud’s house might be served baked guinea pig, mibatter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug. Bud was able to fiin them all, except the on garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almostiably, he became the leading authority on coprolites—fossilized feces—and had a tablemade entirely out of his colle of spes.

    Even when dug serious sce his manner was generally singular. Once Mrs.

    Bud found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband g iement: “My dear, I believe that Cheirotherium ’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.”

    Together they hurried to the kit in their nightclothes. Mrs. Bud made a flour paste,which she spread across the table, while the Reverend Bud fetched the family tortoise.

    Plunking it onto the paste, they goaded it forward and discovered to their delight that itsfootprints did indeed match those of the fossil Bud had been studying. Charles Darwinthought Bud a buffoon—that was the word he used—but Lyell appeared to find himinspiring and liked him well enough to go t with him in Scotland in 1824. It was soohis trip that Lyell decided to abandon a career in law ae himself to geology full-time.

    Lyell was extremely shhted ahrough most of his life with a pained squint,which gave him a troubled air. (Eventually he would l<cite></cite>ose his sight altogether.) His other slightpeculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions onfurniture—lying across two chairs at once or “resting his head on the seat of a chair, whilestanding up” (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so lowin a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor. Lyell’s only real job in life rofessor of geology at King’s College in London from 1831 to 1833. It was around this timethat he produced The Principles of Geology, published in three volumes between 1830 and1833, whi many ways solidated and elaborated upohoughts first voiced byHutton a geion earlier. (Although Lyell never read Hutton in the inal, he was a keenstudent of Playfair’s reworked versioween Hutton’s day and Lyell’s there arose a new geological troversy, which largelysuperseded, but is often fused with, the old unian–Plutonian dispute. The new battlebecame an argumeween catastrophism and uniformitarianism—unattractive terms for animportant and very long-running dispute. Catastrophists, as you might expect from the name,believed that the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events—floods principally, which iswhy catastrophism aunism are often wrongly buogether. Catastrophism articularly f to clerics like Bud because it allowed them to incorporate thebiblical flood of Noah into serious stific discussions. Uniformitarians by trast believedthat ges oh were gradual and that nearly all Earth processes happened slowly, overimmense spans of time. Hutton was much more the father of the notion than Lyell, but it wasLyell most people read, and so he became in most people’s minds, then and now, the father ofmeological thought.

    Lyell believed that the Earth’s shifts were uniform and steady—that everything that hadever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today. Lyell and hisadherents didn’t just disdain catastrophism, they detested it. Catastrophists believed thatextins were part of a series in whiimals were repeatedly wiped out and replacedwith new sets—a belief that the naturalist T. H. Huxley mogly likeo “a succession ofrubbers of whist, at the end of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack.” Itwas too ve a way to explain the unknown. “Never was there a dogma more calculatedto foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” sniffed Lyell.

    Lyell’s  hts  were  not  insiderable. He failed to explain vingly howmountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as a of ge. He refused toaccept Louis Agassiz’s idea of ice ages—“the refrigeration of the globe,” as he dismissivelytermed it—and was fident that mammals “would be found in the oldest fossiliferousbeds.” He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations, andbelieved that all the principal animal groups—mammals, reptiles, fish, and so on—hadcoexisted sihe dawn of time. On all of these he would ultimately be proved wrong.

    Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell’s influehe Principles of Geologywent through twelve editions in Lyell’s lifetime and tained notions that shaped geologicalthinking far into the tweh tury. Darwin took a first edition with him on theBeaglevoyage and wrote afterward that “the great merit of the Principles was that it altered thewhole tone of one’s mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, osaw it partially through his eyes.” In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of hisgeion. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell’s sway that in the 1980s when geologistshad to abandon just a part of it to aodate the impact theory of extins, it nearlykilled them. But that is another chapter.

    Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of s out to do, and not all of it went smoothly.

    From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laiddown, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put the dividing lines—nonemore so than a long-runnie that became known as the Great Devonian troversy.

    The issue arose when the Reverend Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge claimed for the Cambrianperiod a layer of rock that Roderick Murchison believed belonged rightly to the Silurian. Thedispute raged for years and grew extremely heated. “De la Beche is a dirty dog,” Murchisonwrote to a friend in a typical outburst.

    Some sense of the strength of feeling  be gained by glang through the chapter titlesof Martin J. S. Rudwick’s excellent and somber at of the issue, The Great Devoniantroversy. These begin innocuously enough with headings such as “Arenas of Gentlemae” and “Unraveling the Greywacke,” but then proceed on to “The Greywacke Defendedand Attacked,” “Reproofs and Recriminations,” “The Spread of Ugly Rumors,” “WeaverRets His Heresy,” “Putting a Provincial in His Place,” and (in case there was any doubtthat this was war) “Murchisohe Rhineland Campaign.” The fight was finally settledin 1879 with the simple expedient of ing up with a new period, the Ordovi, to beied betweewo.

    Because the British were the most active in the early years, British names are predominantin the geological lexi. Devonian is of course from the English ty of Devon. Cambrianes from the Roman name for Wales, while Ordovi and Silurian recall a Welshtribes, the Ordovices and Silures. But with the rise of geological prospeg elsewhere,names began to creep in from all over.Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border ofFrand Switzerland.Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the UralMountains. ForCretaceous (from the Latin for “chalk”) we are ied to a Belgian geologistwith the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy.

    inally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, sedary,tertiary, and quaternary. The system was too o last, and soon geologists weretributing additional divisions while eliminating others. Primary and sedary fell out ofuse altogether, while quaternary was discarded by some but kept by others. Today oiary remains as a on designation everywhere, even though it no longer represents athird period of anything.

    Lyell, in his Principles, introduced additional units knoochs or series to cover theperiod sihe age of the dinosaurs, among them Pleistoe (“most ret”), Plioe(“more ret”), Mioe (“moderately ret”), and the rather endearingly vague Oligoe(“but a little ret”). Lyell inally inteo employ “-synous” for his endings,giving us such chy designations as Meiosynous and Pleiosynous. TheReverend William Whewell, an iial man, objected oymological grounds andsuggested instead an “-eous” pattern, produg Meioneous, Pleioneous, and so on. The “-e” terminatiohus something of a promise.

    Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into freatks known as eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic (from the Greek meaning “old life”),Mesozoic (“middle life”), and ozoic (“ret life”). These four eras are further dividedinto anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, usually called periods though sometimesknown as systems. Most of these are also reasonably well known: Cretaceous, Jurassic,Triassic, Silurian, and so on.

    1Then e Lyell’s epochs—the Pleistoe, Mioe, and so on—which apply only to themost ret (but paleontologically busy) sixty-five million years, and finally we have a massof finer subdivisions known as stages es. Most of these are named, nearly alwaysawkwardly, after places: Illinoian, Desmoinesian, Croixian, Kimmeridgian, and so on in likevein. Altogether, acc to John McPhee, these number iens of dozens.”

    Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of themagain.

    Further fusing the matter is that the stages es in North America have differentnames from the stages in Europe and often only roughly interse time. Thus the NorthAmeri atian stage mostly corresponds with the Ashgillian stage in Europe, plus atiny bit of the slightly earlier Carado stage.

    Also, all this ges from textbook to textbook and from person to person, so that someauthorities describe seve epochs, while others are tent with four. In some books,too, you will find the tertiary and quaternary taken out and replaced by periods of differehs called the Palaeogene and Neogehers divide the Precambrian into two eras, thevery a Ar and the more ret Proterozoietimes too you will see the termPhanerozoic used to describe the span enpassing the ozoic, Mesozoid Paleozoiceras.

    Moreover, all this applies only to units of time . Rocks are divided into quite separate unitsknown as systems, series, and stages. A distin is also made between late and early(referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to layers of rock). It  all get terriblyfusing to nonspecialists, but to a geologist these  be matters of passion. “I have seengrown men glow indest with rage over this metaphorical millised in life’s history,”

    the British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written with regard to a long-running tweh-tury dispute over where the boundary lies between the Cambrian and Ordovi.

    At least today we  bring some sophisticated dating teiques to the table. For most ofthe eenth tury geologists could draw on nothing more than the most hopefulguesswork. The frustrating position then was that although they could place the various rod fossils in order by age, they had no idea how long any of those ages were. WhenBud speculated oiquity of an Ichthyosaurus skeleton he could do er thansuggest that it had lived somewhere betweehousand, or more thahousand timesten thousand” years earlier.

    Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no she of peoplewilling to try. The most well known early attempt was in 1650 when Archbishop JamesUssher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sourd cluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament , that the Earth had been1There will be ing here, but if you are ever required to memorize them you might wish to remember JohnWilfords helpful advice to think of the eras (Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoi( ozoic) as seasons in ayear and the periods (Permian, Triassic Jurassic, etc.) as the months.

    created at midday on October 23, 4004B.C. , an assertion that has amused historians abook writers ever since.

    2There is a persistent myth, ially—and one propounded in many serious books—thatUssher’s views dominated stific beliefs well into the eenth tury, and that it wasLyell who put everyoraight. Stephen Jay Gould, in Time’s Arrow, cites as a typicalexample this sentence from a popular book of the 1980s: “Until Lyell published his book,most thinking people accepted the idea that the earth was young.” In fao. As Martin J. S.

    Rudwick puts it, “No geologist of any nationality whose work was taken seriously by eologists advocated a timescale fined within the limits of a literalistic exegesis ofGenesis.” Even the Reverend Bud, as pious a soul as the eenth tury produoted that nowhere did the Bible suggest that God made Heaven ah on the first day,but merely “in the beginning.” That beginning, he reasoned, may have lasted “millions uponmillions of years.” Everyone agreed that the Earth was a. The question was simply howa.

    One of the better early attempts at dating the pla came from the ever-reliable EdmondHalley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world’s seasby the amount added each year, you would get the number of y.９9ｌｉｂ?ears that the os had beeence, which would give you a rough idea of Earth’s age. The logic ealing, butunfortunately no one knew how much salt was in the sea or by how much it increased eachyear, which rehe experiment impracticable.

    The first attempt at measurement that could be called remotely stific was made by theFren Gees-Louis Leclerte de Buffon, in the 1770s. It had long been knownthat the Earth radiated appreciable amounts of heat—that arent to anyone who wentdown a i there wasn’t any way of estimating the rate of dissipation. Buffon’sexperiment sisted of heating spheres until they glowed white hot and theimating therate of heat loss by toug them (presumably very lightly at first) as they cooled. From thishe guessed the Earth’s age to be somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 years old. This wasof course a wild uimate, but a radiotion heless, and Buffon found himselfthreatened with exunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at oncefor his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequentwritings.

    By the middle of the eenth tury most learned people thought the Earth was at leasta few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably notmore than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the in of Species , CharlesDarwin annouhat the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southernEngland stretg across Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations,306,662,400 years to plete. The assertion was remarkable partly for being so arrestinglyspecific but even more for flying in the face of accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth.

    3Itproved so tentious that Darwin withdrew it from the third edition of the book. The2Although virtually all books find a space for him, there is a striking variability iails associated withUssher. Some books say he made his pronou in 1650, others in 1654, still others in 1664. Many cite thedate of Earths reputed beginning as October 26. At least one book of note spells his name &quot;Usher.&quot; The matter isiingly surveyed in Stephen Jay Goulds Eight Little Piggies.

    3Darwin loved a number. In a later work, he annouhat the number of worms to be found in anaverage acre of English try soil was 53,767.

    problem at its heart remained, however. Darwin and his geological friends he Earth tobe old, but no one could figure out a way to make it so.

    Unfortunately for Darwin, and fress, the question came to the attention of the greatLord Kelvin (who, though indubitably great, was then still just plain William Thomson; hewouldn’t be elevated to the peerage until 1892, when he was sixty-eight years old and nearingthe end of his career, but I shall follow the vention here of using the roactively).

    Kelvin was one of the most extraordinary figures of the eenth tury—indeed of aury. The German stist Hermann von Helmholtz, no intellectual slouch himself, wrotethat Kelvin had by far the greatest “intelligend lucidity, and mobility of thought” of anyman he had ever met. “I felt quite wooden beside him sometimes,” he added, a bit dejectedly.

    The se is uandable, for Kelvin really was a kind of Victorian superman. Hewas born in 1824 in Belfast, the son of a professor of mathematics at the Royal Academistitution who soon after transferred to Glasgow. There Kelvin proved himself such aprodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow Uy at the exceedingly tender age of ten. Bythe time he had reached his early twenties, he had studied at institutions in London and Paris,graduated from Cambridge (where he won the uy’s top prizes for rowing andmathematics, and somehow found time to launch a musical society as well), beeed afellow of Peterhouse, and written (in Frend English) a dozen papers in pure and appliedmathematics of such dazzling inality that he had to publish them anonymously for fear ofembarrassing his superiors. At the age of twenty-two he returo Glasgow Uy totake up a professorship in natural philosophy, a position he would hold for the  fifty-threeyears.

    In the course of a long career (he lived till 1907 and the age of eighty-three), he wrote 661papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy), and gained renownin nearly every branch of the physical sces. Among much else, he suggested the methodthat led directly to the iion of refrigeration, devised the scale of absolute temperaturethat still bears his name, ied the boosting devices that allowed telegrams to be sentacross os, and made innumerable improvements to shipping and navigation, from theiion of a popular marine pass to the creation of the first depth sounder. And thosewere merely his practical achievements.

    His theoretical work, iromagism, thermodynamics, and the wave theory of light,was equally revolutionary.

    4He had really only one flaw and that was an inability to calculatethe correct age of the Earth. The question occupied much of the sed half of his career, buthe never came anywhere near getting it right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article in apopular magazine called Macmillan’s , suggested that the Earth was 98 million years old, butcautiously allowed that the figure could be as low as 20 million years or as high as 400million. With remarkable prudence he aowledged that his calculations could be wrong if4In particular he elaborated the Sed Law of Thermodynamics. A discussion of these laws would be a book initself, but I offer here this crisp summation by the chemist P. W Atkins, just to provide a sense of them: &quot;Thereare four Laws. The third of them, the Sed Law, was reized first; the first, the Zeroth Law, wasformulated last; the First Law was sed; the Third Law might not even be a law in the same sense as theothers.&quot; In briefest terms, the sed la states that a little energy is always wasted. You t have a perpetualmotion device because no matter how effit, it will always lose energy aually run down. The first lawsays that you t create energy and the third that you t reduce temperatures to absolute zero; there willalways be some residual warmth. As Dennis Overbye he three principal laws are sometimes expressedjocularly as (1) you t win, (2) you t break even, and (3) you t get out of the game.

    “sourow unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation”—but it wasclear that he thought that unlikely.

    With the passage of time Kelvin would beore fht in his assertions and lesscorrect. He tinually revised his estimates downward, from a maximum of 400 millionyears, to 100 million years, to 50 million years, and finally, in 1897, to a mere 24 millionyears. Kelvin wasn’t being willful. It was simply that there was nothing in physics that couldexplain how a body the size of the Sun could burn tinuously for more than a few tens ofmillions of years at most without exhausting its fuel. Therefore it followed that the Sun and itsplas were relatively, but inescapably, youthful.

    The problem was that nearly all the fossil evidence tradicted this, and suddenly in theeenth tury there was a lot of fossil evidence.

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