Geoscience Reference
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one long, undifferentiated mass. This was the geological Dark Age because there was simply no way
to tell one time period from another.
Look at a standard geological timescale, a poster pinned on to every geologist's wall, and you'll
see the Precambrian squeezed into a tiny, unimportant-looking box at the bottom. “This squashed peri-
od contains almost all of Earth history,” the legend ought to say, “and yet we know almost nothing
about it.”
Paul was fascinated by the Precambrian. He felt sure that this long, mysterious period of time must
contain important secrets about how the world works, and he dearly wanted to find them.
The first project Paul embarked on was trying to discover whether the continents behaved in the
same way in the Precambrian as they do today. On geological timescales nothing stays still—not even
continents. Over millions of years, continents skip and skate over the Earth's surface, some crashing
together to throw up mountains, others ripping apart to create ocean basins. Paul wanted to know if
this had always been true, even in the Precambrian. And if so, was the dance of the continents a minuet
or a jitterbug? Were their movements carefully orchestrated, or a random bump and grind?
Gradually, Paul began to piece together the way the plates that would become North America
moved during the Precambrian. Rather disappointingly, they looked just as random as in more recent
times. They were clearly dancing a jitterbug, not a minuet. Still, he put his results together with geo-
logical maps from all over North America and began to trace exactly how the continent had formed.
He discovered that most of the formation took place in a short, frenzied burst of activity around 2 bil-
lion years ago, when seven small plates crashed together and stuck in place. After eight painstaking
years of researching this tale, Paul published a massive synthesis, which he called “United Plates of
America”. 6 The research required two skills: careful attention to detail and the sort of mind that can
synthesize countless arcane facts into one overall, compelling picture. Nobody else in the world could
have written it.
L IFE WAS good, even away from the rocks, during the long Canadian winters when Paul was forced
back southwards to analyse his data and kick his heels. He was still running, and he had a new ob-
session to add to his life: music. As a teenager, Paul's attention had been caught by modern classical
music, but in his junior year at college he was introduced to African-American music: modern jazz
and pre-war blues; Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy. He collected recordings voraciously
throughout the seventies. Soon he had a thousand records, then two thousand and more. His opinions
were characteristically forceful. Miles Davis and John Coltrane? Overrated. Charlie Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie? Fabulous. They're the real musicians, the ones who deserve the credit they never fully get.
And Louis Armstrong. His care with notes! His extraordinary musicianship! People were put off by
Armstrong's stage persona. They thought he was an Uncle Tom. But Armstrong knew what he was
doing. Every note, every rhythm was as precise as they come. Billie Holiday, a singer with true soul.
Ella. Yes, she had a fantastic voice. Yes, great technique. But she was never compelling as a musical
artist. She never connected emotionally.
Paul began to host a radio show, which was aired live on Wednesday evenings from nine to eleven.
He played an eclectic mixture of jazz, blues, gospel, country-and-western, all from his own record
collection. He talked about the history of the music, the particular idiosyncrasies of the musicians, the
merits of different recordings. He talked about how to listen to the music, what to like, what not to
like. His show developed a cult following, and Paul loved it.
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