Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the Earth. Haughtonwas nomathematical slouch and his calculations
were spot-on, but his problemwas that the basic figures he used for the
calculation were flawed.
By 1868, following work by Charles Darwin's fifth child George
Howard Darwin (1845-1912) on the orbit of the Moon and the Earth's
retardation rates, Thomson stuck his head above the parapet regarding
the tidal friction estimate of time and said that on the basis of this
method the Earth was less than 1,000 million years old. Darwin fils
had suggested that the Moon had been formed by metastasis from the
Earth, frommaterial thrown out owing to rapid spinning of the parent
body - a theory nowknown to be fantastic and incorrect. He calculated
the time taken for the Earth and Moon to settle down from this initial
rupture to their present condition and came up with a minimum of
56 million years.
Thomson's detractors, of whom there were few, given his repu-
tation, questioned his figures regarding the internal temperature and
gradient in the Earth, and also questioned his reliance on a theory
without what they considered any geological foundation. Thomas
Mellard Reade in 1878 said that 'Facts are safer than theories' implying
that Thomson relied too heavily on the latter. The Reverend Osmund
Fisher (1817-1914) stated in a paper published in the Geological
Magazine in 1895 that 'no reliable estimate of the age of the world,
based on considerations of the present temperature gradient at
the surface, has hitherto been made.' James Geikie (1839-1915),
younger brother of Archibald and his successor to the Chair of
Geology at Edinburgh, wrote in the February 1900 issue of the
Scottish Geographical Magazine, 'there are certain other considera-
tions which increase one's doubts as to the adequacy of Lord Kelvin's
theory.' Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (1843-1928), President of the
University of Wisconsin, was probably Thomson's most outspoken
critic, at least in America. He believed that the Earth had formed
thanks to the accretion of cold material and that it had never been
fully molten. Caustically he remarked in 1899 in a paper published
in the journal Science that 'the postulate of a white-hot liquid
