Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Later in his career Patterson made the study of lead contamination of
the environment his speciality, and we owe him a great debt for doing
so much to highlight the dangerous health implications posed by his
element. In 1992 he retired from the faculty of the California Institute
of Technology and this occasionwasmarked with a two-day conference
on 'Topics in Global Geochemistry' held on 3 and 4 December in
Pasadena, California, and attended by fifty friends and scientists.
Arising out of this meeting the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica
Acta published a special volume dedicated to him in 1994. The pub-
lication of a series of papers from the conference in this journal was only
right, given it was in its pages that Patterson's classic paper on meteor-
ites and the age of the Earth had appeared thirty-eight years earlier.
Patterson contributed three papers to the conference proceed-
ings: one jointly authored piece examined the sources of lead in
the surface waters of the North Atlantic; another, the final paper in
the compilation, discussed the separation of thought processes in the
human brain; while the last was an examination of the worth of
scientific knowledge. He perceived a loss of integrity in modern geo-
logical research as he lamented that latter-day geologists were con-
cerned with the acquisition of large data sets and models which
provided solutions to open and closed cases. These researchers, he
argued, failed to grasp the sense of continuum in their science.
We have all heard the expression first used by Isaac Newton, that
he had 'stood on the shoulders of giants' - the contributions of earlier
scientists and thinkingmen and womenwho provided the platformon
which he could advance scientific understanding. Patterson in this
volume articulated the same sentiments. He humbly acknowledged
that he had become a scientist when he had been fortunate to be the
first person to experience the numbing realisation of knowing the true
age of the Earth. But at the precise moment of making this discovery
he was unable to accept that he had done it. He could not jump for
