A Brief History of Time (Aeons - Martin Gorst)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Aeons - Martin Gorst
Date:	01/11/01 (106 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting & enlightening.

Disadvantages: Astronomically priced.

So when did the universe begin exactly? And why wasn't I invited?
Well, according to the calculations of James Ussher, a 17th century Irish bishop, God created the universe on Saturday 22nd October 4004 BC.
At 6pm. The bible told him so. Shakespeare would have agreed with him, had he still been alive. In As You Like It, Rosalind describes the world as being "almost six thousand years" old. (Act 4, Scene 1)

Well we've come a long way since then. According to a Gallup poll in 1999,
only 47% of Americans thought the Earth was less than 10,000 years old.
Hmmm, remind me, what percentage of the votes did George Dubya get?

Ussher had managed to connect the chronologies of the Old and New Testaments, by reference to Greek and Roman histories. The connecting point being the death of Nebuchadnezzar, which he pinpointed at 562 BC.
It fitted nicely with the prophecy contained in the Jewish Talmud that the world would exist for 6,000 years: the first 2,000 being void, then 2,000 years called the period of the Torah, and finally 2,000 years of the Messiah culminating in the end of the world circa 1997. So why are we still here?
Well, it just goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you read.

Yes but why are we here? Oh sorry, I forgot. Aeons is one of those lovely little 'popular science' type books which chronicles Man's quest to discover the age of the world. (Women probably couldn't care less I suppose.)
Religion and science intermingle and do battle, as Martin Gorst tells us about the various theories mooted over the last 350 years, and the people behind them. It's a fascinating and highly readable little book, suitable for all ages. (I say little because it's one of those dinky half-size books.) Gorst writes and directs TV science documentaries, by the way,
but there's no sign of an accompanying series (yet?)

Ussher's chronology became widely kn
own, largely thanks to Thomas Guy (later to be the founder of Guy's Hospital) who made a fortune by selling Bibles with his dates in the margins. There are probably still a few of them knocking around - the Oxford University Press didn't stop using his dates until 1910. Even when a smartyarse French lawyer suggested that there must have been men before Adam (otherwise where did Cain's wife come from?) it was still sorted as far as the God-squad were concerned.
Ahhh, but then a Jesuit missionary went to China and found that they had records stretching back nearly 3,000 years, validated by observations of eclipses, and with no sign of a global flood. Vatican, we have a problem...

The early 17th century was a dangerous time, people in many countries lived in fear of an evil terrorist organization calling itself the Inquisition. The philosopher René Descartes moved to the protestant Netherlands
so that he could think in peace while writing a book about The World.
But after the arrest of Galileo, the plucky Frenchman delayed publication.
In it he suggested that the universe might be governed by certain "laws of nature", paving the way for Sir Isaac Newton's 'clockwork universe'.
Ironically, Newton was a very pious man, who spent much of his life defending the time-scale of the Bible. Quite a canny defender he was too - pointing out that since the Bible claims the Earth wasn't created until the third day, the first two 'days' could have been any length whatsoever.

Are you bored yet? Welcome to the new dooyoo. Mega-lengthy crown-seeking ops, rather than short, snappy ones, to try and make enough dosh to make it worth the effort. Feel free to go and make a cup of tea, we've got about three hundred years to go yet. Lots of people you've never heard of - like the homosexual philosopher John Woodward, who came up with the 'hasty pudding' theory which suggested that the fossi
ls of animals were spread the way they were because the animals had died in the great flood. Plus some names you will recognize, like Edmund Halley who reckoned that the age of the Earth could be calculated by measuring the saltiness of the sea because the salinity slowly increases over time.

At times scientists didn't so much pass on the baton, as try to batter each other with it. So when Charles Darwin made presumptions about the age of the planet in his theory On the Origin of Species, his enemies pounced. For evolution to take place required the Earth to have been around for hundreds of millions of years. William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) 'proved' this was wrong in three different ways, and Darwin died full of doubts.
But then radioactivity was discovered, and radiometric dating showed the planet was in fact several BILLION years old. (Four and a half to be exact.)
The twentieth century saw astronomers and cosmologists racing against each other to compute the age of the universe. Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies were racing away from each other, and a catholic priest called Georges Lemaître suggested that the universe was expanding.
The implication being that there was a moment of creation after all.
Atheists, including the Russians and the British astronomer Fred Hoyle went into denial. Hoyle proposed his own alternative 'Steady State' theory and ridiculed what he called the 'Big Bang Theory'.

Then in the 1990's two teams of scientists searching for supernovae,
and another using the Hubble Space Telescope to find cepheids
(stars known as 'standard candles' because they are all equally bright), independently came to an unexpected conclusion: the expansion of the universe is getting faster... Wooooo, fasten your safety belts everyone!
The good news is that this may conveniently explain the 'missing mass' problem which has had cosmologists scratching their heads
and searching for dark matter. They reckon the 'missing mass' could be masquerading as the energy that drives the accelerated expansion.

I was disappointed to find out that the value of the Hubble Constant (a measure of the rate of expansion of the universe) turns out to be around 70, and not 42 as I had hoped. But I did learn some stuff I didn't know before. Apparently Darwin suffered from boils and flatulence - just the sort of detail that makes science live, dontcha think? The world needs more books like this, showing the human faces behind the history of science. Although I have to admit that I've already forgotten the names of the people I'd never heard of before, and I only finished reading it yesterday.

Oh, I nearly forgot to give you the final score - currently the best estimate is that the universe is 13.4 billion years old ± 1.6 billion. So now we know.


¶ Hardback: £14.99 ¶ pp 314 ¶ ISBN: 1841151173 ¶
¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ pp 320 ¶ ISBN: 1841151181 ¶ April 1st 2002 ¶
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