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N O T E S
1 . A C A L L F O R T I M E F U L N E S S
1. Descartes, R., 1641, translated by Michael Moriarty, 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, p. 16.
2. Haldane is supposed to have said this when asked what could cause him to aban-
don his certitude about evolution. The memorable quote has been cited many
times, but its origin is not clear.
3. Barker, D., and Bearce, D., 2012. End- times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing climate change. Political Research Quarterly, 66, 267– 279. doi:0.1177/1065912912442243.
4. Baumol, W., and Bowen, W., 1966. Performing Arts— The Economic Dilemma:
A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music, and Dance. New York:
Twentieth Century Fund, 582 pp.
5. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is a minority voice chiding his discipline for
what he calls the systematic “expulsion of time.” Smolin, L., 2013, Time Reborn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp.
6. Including Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in Chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life
Insurance. 2010. New York: William Morrow, 320 pp.
2 . A N AT L A S O F T I M E
1. McPhee, J., 1981. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, p. 20.
2. It should be noted that some non- Western cultures had prescientific concepts
of “Deep Time.” For example, Hinduism and Buddhism share the concept of
kalpa, a Sanskrit word for a cosmological eon— an interval of time far longer than human experience and memory. Other cultures outside the Abrahamic
traditions likely had similar ideas about the antiquity of the Universe. But in
Europe, where modern geologic thinking began, biblical doctrine was long a
barrier to scientific understanding.
3. While this number was not an accurate determination of the age of the Earth,
it is not without meaning; it is close to the modern estimate of the average time
an atom of sodium remains in the sea (its residence time) before being removed via sea spray or precipitation of rock salt. See Appendix II for characteristic residence times of other geologic “commodities.”
4. Thomson, W., (Lord Kelvin) 1872. President’s Address. Report of the Forty- First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Edinburgh,
194 Notes to ch a pter 2
pp. lxxiv- cv. Reprinted in Kelvin, 1894, Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. 2.
London: Macmillan, pp. 132– 205.
5. For a lively, readable biography of Arthur Holmes, see Cherry Lewis, 2000, The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. The Rutherford- Soddy law, the mathematical description of radioactive decay, is dP/ dt = −λ P, where P is the number of atoms of the parent isotope at any given time, dP/ dt is the rate of decay, and λ is the decay constant for that isotope. The relationship between the half- life t 1/2 and the decay constant is t 1/2 = ln 2/λ, or 0.693/λ. In about 10 mathematical steps, it is possible to derive from Rutherford’s law an equation— the Age Equation— that expresses the age of a mineral (time
elapsed since crystallization, t) as a function of the daughter/parent ratio D/ P
and the decay constant λ. It is simply: t = 1/λ [ln ( D/ P +1)].
7. International Commission on Stratigraphy: http:// www .stratigraphy .org /index
.php /ics -gssps.
8. An audio interview with Nier about his work before and during the Manhattan
Project can be heard at http:// manhattanprojectvoices .org /oral -histories /alfred
-niers -interview -part -1.
9. It should be acknowledged that a Russian geochemist, E. K. Gerling, carried out a very similar calculation at virtually the same time as Holmes and obtained an age
of 3.1 billion years. But his work was not known in the West until much later. See
Dalrymple, G. B., 2001. The age of the Earth in the twentieth century: A problem
(mostly) solved. In Lewis, C. and Knell, S., The Age of the Earth from 4004 BC to AD 2002. Geological Society of London Special Publication 190, 205– 221.
10. Brush, S., 2001. Is the Earth too old? The impact of geochronology on cosmol-
ogy, 1929– 1952. In Lewis, C., and Knell, S., The Age of the Earth from 4004 BC
to AD 2002. Geological Society of London Special Publication 190, 157– 175.
11. Patterson, C., 1956. Age of meteorites and the Earth. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 10, 230– 277. doi:10.1016/0016– 7037(56)90036– 9.
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3 . T H E PA C E O F T H E E A R T H
1. The lack of detailed information about seafloor topography was underscored by
the search for the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared
somewhere in the Indian Ocean in March 2014. In 2016, an international geo-
physical team conducted echo soundings along a swath 100 miles wide and 1500
miles long in an area about 1000 miles west of Australia, revealing many previously unknown fracture zones, escarpments, landslides, and volcanic centers, but no
trace of the lost aircraft. See Picard, K., Brooke, B., and Coffin, M., 2017. Geo-
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3. Vine, F., and Matthews, D., 1963. Magnetic anomalies over mid- ocean ridges.
Nature, 199, 947– 950.
4. East Pacific Rise Study Group, 1981. Crustal processes of the mid- ocean ridge,
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5. Gondwanaland, which included India, Africa, South America, Australia, and
Antarctica, was first hypothesized and named in the 1880s by the Austrian ge-
ologist Edward Suess based on similarities in the fossils, rock strata, and ancient mountain ranges of the southern landmasses. The name was later used by the
German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in his 1915 treatise Origin of Continents
and Oceans, which made a strong case for continental drift a half- century before the discovery of seafloor spreading and development of plate tectonic theory.
6. Ruskin, J., 1860. Modern Painters, vol. 4: Of Mountain Beauty, p. 196– 197. Available through Project Gutenberg: http:// www .gutenberg .org /files /31623 /31623
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9. Clift, P. D., et al., 2001. Development of the Indus Fan and its significance for the erosional history of the Western Himalaya and Karakoram. Geological Society of
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