The Abyss of Time - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 3

the differential equation that describes how to determine the temperature in a solid
bodyatanytimeinthefuture.Fortherestofhislonglife,WilliamThomsonwould
return to this early paper and its implications, which “contain[ed] the germs of
many of his subsequent ideas.” 6 At the end of the paper Thomson speculated on
the effect were he to assign negative values to time. The equations then gave im-
possible results, convincing him “that there must have been an origin to the natural
order of the cosmos. There must have been a beginning.” 7
In looking back at his body of work from the vantage point of 1882, Thomson
wrote that this youthful essay “gave a very decisive limitation to the possible age
of the earth as a habitation for living creatures, and proved the untenability of the
enormous claims for TIME which, uncurbed by physical science, geologists and
biologists had begun to make and to regard as unchallengeable” (186).
The implications of Fourier's mathematics, first encountered by young William
Thomson at age sixteen, would occupy him intermittently but without surcease for
sixty-eight years, until his death in 1907. By then he was known as Lord Kelvin,
the world's most acclaimed and accomplished scientist.
High Priest of Uniformitarianism
Just before Fourier began his mathematical advances, geology began to emerge
as a true science. The pivotal insight came from the Scotsman James Hutton
(1726-1797). Trained as a physician and chemical manufacturer, Hutton inherited
several farms from his father, allowing him the opportunity to roam the land and
pursue his interest in geology. Not content merely to observe, Hutton set out to ex-
plain.
Hutton believed that God had created the Earth for man. Since sections of the
Eartharevisiblyeroding,someprocessmustrestoreit;elseourplanetwouldeven-
tually become uninhabitable, surely not God's intent. Hutton came to believe that
eroded sediments are deposited in the sea and subsequently hardened, heated, up-
lifted, and returned to the continents, where they erode to start the process again.
He viewed earth history as a series of endless cycles of decay and rejuvenation,
with, in his most famous phrase, “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an
end.” 8
This view contrasted mightily with the rival theory of geology, which saw earth
history as ruled bycatastrophe: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the like. Cata-
strophism fit well with the short chronology of Archbishop James Ussher and his
followers, which allowed only a few thousand years for all of geologic time. Hut-