Click on image to enlarge.
|
Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time [Secure eReader (recommended)/Microsoft Reader/Adobe]
eBook by Martin Gorst
| |
Regular |
|
 |
|
Club |
| You Pay: |
$13.95 |
|
|
|
$11.86 |
| Micropay Rebate: |
$1.40 |
|
|
|
$1.19 |
| Cost After Rebate: |
$12.55 |
|
|
|
$10.67 |
| You Save: |
10.04% |
|
|
|
23.51% |
eBook Category: Technology/Science/Technology/Science
eBook Description:  The moment of the universe's inception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 B.C. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early-twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who was alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah's flood. Regrettably, it was only the imprint of a large salamander." And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take a billion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Doubleday/Broadway, Published: 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2002
1 Reader Ratings:
|
|
|
|
|
| Great |
Good |
OK |
Poor |
Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Microsoft Reader/Adobe - What's this?]: SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [1.2 MB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [1.2 MB], SECURE ADOBE FORMAT [2.3 MB]
Words: 150000
Reading time: 428-600 min.
Secure Adobe: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 9780767910989
Adobe Reader ISBN: 9780767910989
Mobipocket Reader ISBN: 0767910982
eReader ISBN: 9780767910989
GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTIONS: Available to customers in: US What's this?
 
1
In the BeginningSometimes the past is nearer than you think. The other day, out of curiosity, I opened my grandmother's Bible, and there, printed alongside the opening verse of Genesis, was the date for the beginning of the world--4004 B.C. This came as a surprise. Not because I didn't know about the date--I did. It was devised by an Irish bishop called James Ussher in the early seventeenth century. No, what surprised me was that anyone should still be proclaiming this as fact as recently as the twentieth century. My grandmother's Bible was printed in 1901. Surely everyone knew by then that the world was far older than this?I first came across Bishop Ussher's date about fifteen years ago, in a couple of science books written in the 1920s but reprinted in the thirties as those popular paperbacks you can still pick up for a few dollars secondhand. When I went back recently and reread them, what struck me was how seriously they treated what I had regarded as a totally improbable date. Nobody in the twentieth century, I assumed, could really have believed that the world was created--as Ussher maintained--at 6 P.M. on Saturday, October 22, 4004 B.C. Yet the passion with which the authors of these books attacked the date gave the appearance of a controversy that, although no longer red-hot, was nevertheless still sizzling. H. G. Wells, writing in 1922, referred to the date as "this fantastically precise misconception," based upon "rather arbitrary theological assumptions." The English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, writing around the same time, was characteristically more strident: "we need not pay much attention to clergymen who protest their reverence for Scripture, and yet continue to use, or permit their flocks to use, bibles adorned with the conjectures of an Irish divine." There's no sign here of the mild amusement with which we view Ussher's date today. These words were the still-glowing embers of a once blazing debate--a debate that had been running since Ussher's dates first appeared in the Bible in the late seventeenth century, and that, in another form, still rages today. At its heart is an inquiry of great significance to both religion and science--the search for the beginning of time. When did the universe begin? It is one of the simplest, yet one of the most fundamental questions humanity can ask. For the quest to measure the span of the world's existence is more than just an academic pursuit for an abstract figure; it is the point where science and belief merge or clash fatally. Once Ussher's date for the age of the world had been fixed in the pages of the Bible, and science had embarked on its relentless journey of inquiry, then, like a supertanker heading for a reef, collision was inevitable. Like the famous debate over whether or not the Earth revolved around the sun, the search for the age of the universe was a search for truth. But in this case, the truth took longer to grasp. To begin with, the belief in a short-lived world was so deeply rooted that many of the earliest natural philosophers assumed their studies would confirm the biblical account--the truths of Scripture and the truths of nature, they believed, were one and the same. Only gradually did it become apparent that the world was far older than the Bible said it was. But even after they had accepted this, philosophers struggled to overcome their own preconceived ideas. As they pushed back the frontiers of time they became aware, with growing horror, of its awesome scale.
|
)
