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

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Posted by............: ~tqw~



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"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug

Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's

Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past

arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects

and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) dating--the best known of these

methods--and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant

past, Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances, explaining how they reveal

the age of our fossil ancestors such as "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs'

extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the

beginning of the Earth's history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes

how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these

advances through the stories of the scientists themselves--James Hutton, William

Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson--

Macdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of

modern science's most significant accomplishments: a timescale for the Earth's

evolution and human prehistory.



Table Of Contents



List of Illustrations     ix

Acknowledgments     xi

No Vestige of a Beginning ...     1

Mysterious Rays     21

Wild Bill's Quest     45

Changing Perceptions     72

Getting the Lead Out     101

Dating the Boundaries     131

Clocking Evolution     159

Ghostly Forests and Mediterranean Volcanoes     190

More and More from Less and Less     219

The Geological Time Scale     239

Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements     241

Additional Notes     245

Glossary     251

Resources and Further Reading     257

Index     265



Product Details



    * ISBN: 0520249755

    * ISBN-13: 9780520249752

    * Format: Hardcover, 278pp

    * Publisher: University of California Press

    * Pub. Date: June 2008

    * Edition Number: 1



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