Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
investigations using more powerful telescopes which allowed them to
see further into space than ever before. By the early 1950s they realised
that the Universe was bigger than hitherto imagined, and that distance
could be converted into time: at least 10,000 million years. Now in
1950 the chronological sequence made sense: Universe (10,000 million
years old)
!
Earth (3,350 million years old), and all factions, geo-
logists, physicists and astronomers could re-establish an amicable
relationship.
By 1958 Allan Rex Sandage (b. 1926) had added another 3,000
million years to the astronomers' figure, and was touting an age for the
Universe of 13,000 million years, which he based on research into the
spectral characteristics of stellar clusters. Later he went on to suggest
that the Universe expands with a 'Big Bang' and contracts with a 'Big
Crunch' over and over again every 82 billion years or so. The idea later
went out of fashion, but his estimate of 13,000 million years as
the actual age of the Universe has so far stood the test of four decades
of time.
THE PREPARATIONOF DUCK SOUP
Sometime early in 1951 the geochemist Harrison Scott Brown
(1917-1986) went looking for one of his new graduates at the
Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago so he could
discuss his research topic with him. Brown was interested in the new
field of nuclear geochemistry and was part of a group of superb stu-
dents and academics, some of whom had worked on the Manhattan
Project that produced the first atomic bomb. This group tackled pro-
blems such as using carbon-14 for dating, a technique developed by
Willard Frank Libby (1908-1980) that has limited geological applica-
tion but yielded a precise archaeological chronology. Carbon-14 is
only suitable for material less than 50,000 years old because its half-
life is so short. For this work Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in 1960. Before arriving in Chicago, Harold Clayton Urey
(1893-1981) had discovered deuterium for which he received the 1934
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and he had also derived many dates for
