Account Overdrawn - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 24

Joly continued to write and lecture until his death in 1933, but he never com-
pletely forsook the method that had brought him a moment of fame. By that time,
scientists had plumbed the atom and shown beyond doubt that the Earth is at least
ten times older than Joly's upper limit.
It seems paradoxical, even tragic, that though Joly participated in the discovery
and use of the new methods of measuring geologic time based on radioactivity,
even founding an institute to explore the use of radium in medicine, he could never
desert the hourglass of salt for the rigor of the atom.
Joly's last publication was “History of the Irish Radium Institute” in 1931. 20 In
that year, the U.S. National Research Council published a report titled The Age of
the Earth . The author of the chapter on radioactivity and geologic time was a pro-
lific Briton named Arthur Holmes (1890-1965), whom we will meet repeatedly
and for whom a good case can be made as the greatest geologist of the twentieth
century.