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| A little Neil deGrasse magic at the Grand Canyon. |
Many scholars over the centuries had pondered just how old our Earth might be, including an Irish archbishop named James Ussher. Ussher started with the Bible, specifically the account of the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in the Second Book of Kings. By tracing the various biblical genealogies — what host Neil de Grasse Tyson calls “counting the begats” — he triumphantly declared that the Earth was born on October 22, 4004 BC, at 6 p.m. on a Saturday.
That is certainly specific; it is also spectacularly wrong. One is reminded of Galileo’s observation about the dangers of using the Bible as a guide to scientific questions. Loosely paraphrased: The Bible teaches us how to get to heaven; it is not a treatise on how the heavens move.
Later scholars turned to the book of nature to unlock secrets that would shed light on Earth's age, specifically the many layers of rock and sediment that represent various epochs in Earth’s geological history. Instead of counting the begats, scientists could count the layers. But even that method didn’t prove accurate enough.
A fragment of meteorite retrieved from Canyon Diablo held the answer. Such objects are relics from the formation of the solar system, including Earth, and they contain many different elements, notably uranium, a radioactive substance that over time decays into lead. In the 1940s, a physicist at the University of Chicago named Harrison Brown thought it might be possible to determine the age of the Earth by counting the lead isotopes in such a meteorite.
Brown tasked his protege, Clair Patterson, with the experiment to determine the age of the earth, and after overcoming numerous obstacles, he finally did.
The episode demonstrated with great detail the process by which Patterson reached the conclusion that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and then compared it to the completely unscientific counting of "begats" performed by Archbishop Usher, using the Bible as his sole source of data.
This served to illustrate just how meticulous the scientific process had been, especially when compared to what was essentially uneducated guessing.
Interestingly enough his work with determining the age of the earth, revealed to Clair Patterson that there was an inordinate amount of lead in the environment. Which was a deadly toxin to human beings.
This realization ultimately led to him discovering that the most egregious source for this poison was the exhaust pipes of our very own automobiles.
Of course this led to conflict with the gas companies who brought in their own experts to discredit him, he lost his funding, and was the victim of character assassination for years. (Sound familiar?)
Ultimately, as we all know, the lead was removed from our gasoline, our paint, and many other products in order to protect the environment and protect us as well.
I felt that Cosmos did a great job of undermining the Creationist argument for a young planet, while providing evidence for how those with a vested interest in arguing against certain scientific findings are willing to spend vast amounts of money, and utilize political muscle, to change the narrative.
It was a very good, and very important, program. Which should inspire some fundamentalist backlash in 3..2..1
"SCIENCE"
ReplyDeleteWhy we can't have nice things like lead paint, leaded gas and Agent Orange.
Better add a little napalm to your shopping list to go along with a few extra A-10 Warthogs, C27-J transport planes and Abrams Tanks that Congress insists the US military purchase, whether they are needed or not. Then we can sell them all as "surplus" at dramatically reduced prices to Israel. Given all of the chickenhawks in Washington, Bibi is too smart to ever pay retail when he can buy the best we can produce at 40 -50 cents on the dollar, well below our cost. Plus there's all the "foreign aid" shit we outright give to our allies, usually in military stuff. Because our congress insists on being so fiscally responsible, you know
DeleteHere in MN we get the double treat of PBS presenting a show featuring how we share traits of fish an reptiles. Two hours to leave the creationists to get their blood pressure boiling. Then again they don't know enough to understand physiology of HBP so they just sit there and scream at the TV
ReplyDeleteI am currently reading "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Colbert. It's available hardcover or on Kindle. She deals with the "begats" issue quite nicely in the first part of her book. She and Neil pretty much have the same thing to say about it, scientifically. "Sixth Extinction" is pretty dark though, and has a lot of graphic evidence of humans purposely taking other species to extinction even before we as humans even understood what that meant. It also shows how we've upgraded out bad human behavior to a point that our planet can no longer sustain us.
ReplyDeleteGiving these fools a scientific beat down is NOT hard to do. What IS hard to do is getting them to SHUT UP!
ReplyDeleteThat sound you hear are heads exploding. Cosmos with Professor De Grasse is the best!
ReplyDeleteI laughed out loud several times during the show as he hit points that I know would drive them nuts.
ReplyDeletelove seeing that FOX logo on it...haha...must just kill them to have this on "THEIR" station.
ReplyDelete… the completely unscientific counting of "begats" performed by Archbishop Usher, using the Bible as his sole source of data.
ReplyDeleteIn defence of the good archbishop, the Bible was not his sole source of data. According to the article about his calculations which I cited last Friday, he used a number of other sources, notably for the Late Age of Kings, from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah to the birth of Jesus. For this period "[n]o information at all is provided in the Bible. Ussher and his counterparts therefore had to try to link a known event from this period with a dateable event in another culture, such as the Chaldeans, Persians or Romans. For instance, the death of the Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar II (who conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC) could be correlated with the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin (2 Kings 25:27)." Other sources he used include Kepler's astronomical tables and the start time of the Jewish calendar year. In fact, "Ussher's Annales is estimated to have relied on the Bible for only one sixth of its volume."
If he used begats exclusively, some of the generations were seven or eight hundred years or more (Noah), depending on what kind of mood god happened to be in at the time.
DeleteSo maybe it adds up to something closer to 4.5 billion years instead of 6,000 to 10,000 years. Because, you know, rounding error or whatnot. Or maybe low batteries in his calculator.
One of my favourite songs about God creating the earth: "If There Is A God He's A Queen"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDA1ydgDinM
Just remember, in biblical times the majority of humans thought the world was flat...
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help thinking as I watched, if Patterson was testifying now, we would still have lead in our gasoline forever because of the change in our political, business and media climate.
ReplyDeleteClimate change is just as serious as lead was, yet look at the progress or I should say obstruction that is taking place regarding changes to at the least rein in behaviors and practices that are contributing to climate change.