Download Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost by Doug Macdougall PDF

By Doug Macdougall

"Radioactivity is sort of a clock that by no means wishes adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It will be tough to layout a extra trustworthy timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who have been trying to comprehend the prior arrived on the creative thoughts they now use to figure out the age of gadgets and organisms. via reading radiocarbon (C-14) dating—the top recognized of those methods—and numerous different suggestions that geologists use to decode the far away earlier, Macdougall unwraps the final century's advances, explaining how they exhibit the age of our fossil ancestors corresponding to "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs' extinction, and the proper a long time of tiny mineral grains that date from the start of the earth's historical past. In vigorous and available prose, he describes how the technological know-how of geochronology has constructed and flourished. touching on those advances throughout the tales of the scientists themselves—James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson—Macdougall exhibits how they used ingenuity and notion to build certainly one of sleek science's most vital accomplishments: a timescale for the earth's evolution and human prehistory.

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Extra info for Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything

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No Vestige of a Beginning … Chapter 2. Mysterious Rays Chapter 3. Wild Bill’s Quest Chapter 4. Changing Perceptions Chapter 5. Getting the Lead Out Chapter 6. Dating the Boundaries Chapter 7. Clocking Evolution Chapter 8. Ghostly Forests and Mediterranean Volcanoes Chapter 9. More and More from Less and Less Appendix A. The Geological Time Scale Appendix B. Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements Appendix C. Additional Notes Glossary Resources and Further Reading Index ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES 1. Oetzi, the Alpine Iceman 2.

Suddenly the Alpine Iceman became an international celebrity, his picture splashed across newspapers and magazines around the world. Speculation about how he had died was rife. Did he simply lie down in exhaustion to rest, never to get up again, or was he set upon by ancient highwaymen intent on robbing him? ) Fascination about the life of this fellow human being, and his preservation over the millennia entombed in ice, stirred the imagination of nearly everyone who heard his story. Oetzi also generated a minor (or perhaps, if you care deeply about such things, not so minor) controversy.

That “taking for granted” attitude was one of the primary reasons for writing this book. Most people don’t think twice when they hear that archaeologists have found an artifact and dated it to 9,000 years, or that paleontologists have unearthed the fossil of a strange creature that lived 150 million years ago. They don’t pause to wonder just how scientists arrive at such amazing conclusions. And when I quizzed friends and acquaintances—and some bright undergraduate students—about radiocarbon dating, it turned out that they had all heard of it, but, beyond that, their understanding was murky.

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