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

	Author(s):	Doug Macdougall
	Collection:
	Publisher:	University of California Press
	Year:	2009
	Language:	English
	Pages:	285 pages
	Size:	1.81 MB
	Extension:	PDF

[tab] [content title="Description"]"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. [/content] [content title="Content"] [/content] [content title="About the author"]Doug Macdougall is an author, geoscientist, and educator. He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Sheila. As is true for many people, my career has been charted partly through serendipity. Growing up in Ontario, Canada, I was especially interested in nature and the outdoors. By the time I was in high school I was convinced that I wanted to be an ornithologist – a friend had introduced me to the panorama of bird life that annually flows through southern Ontario. But at the University of Toronto a first year course in geology, with slides from exotic locales around the world, coupled with the sometimes unpleasant dissections we had to perform in a biology class (we were required to cut up everything from earthworms to frogs and fetal pigs), turned my focus to the earth sciences. [/content] [/tab]

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