Measuring Eternity The Search For The Beginning Of Time

Author : Martin Gorst
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0767908449
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Measuring Eternity written by Martin Gorst and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002-11-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin? The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah's flood. Regrettably it was only the imprint of a large salamander. And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take a billion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Measuring Eternity : the Search for the Beginning of Time written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin? The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages.

Author : Adam Frank
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439169608
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book About Time written by Adam Frank and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Big Bang is dead and astrophysicist Adam Frank explains how our experience of time will change as a result"--

Author : Sean Carroll
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0452296544
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Eternity to Here written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An accessible and engaging exploration of the mysteries of time." -Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking tried to explain time by understanding the Big Bang. Now, Sean Carroll says we need to be more ambitious. One of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, Carroll delivers a dazzling and paradigm-shifting theory of time's arrow that embraces subjects from entropy to quantum mechanics to time travel to information theory and the meaning of life. From Eternity to Here is no less than the next step toward understanding how we came to exist, and a fantastically approachable read that will appeal to a broad audience of armchair physicists, and anyone who ponders the nature of our world.

Author : H. James Birx
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1412941644
Total Pages : 593 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encyclopedia of Time written by H. James Birx and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the major facts, concepts, theories, and speculations that infuse our present comprehension of time, the Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, and Culture explores the contributions of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and creative artists from ancient times to the present. By drawing together into one collection ideas from scholars around the globe and in a wide range of disciplines, this Encyclopedia will provide readers with a greater understanding of and appreciation for the elusive phenomenon experienced as time. Features · Surveys historical thought about time, including those that emerged in ancient Greece, early Christianity, the Italian Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and other periods+ Covers the original and lasting insights of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, physicist Albert Einstein, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin + Discusses the significance of time in the writings of Isaac Asimov, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Francesco Petrarch, and numerous other authors+ Includes the contributions of naturalists, philosophers, physicists, theologians, astronomers, anthropologists, geologists, paleontologists, and psychologists+ Includes artists+ portrayals of the fluidity of time, including painter Salvador Dali+s The Persistence of Memory and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and writers Gustave Flaubert+s The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Henryk Sienkiewicz+s Quo Vadis+ Provides a truly interdisciplinary approach, with discussions of Aztec, Buddhist, Christian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Islamic, Hindu, Navajo, and many other cultures+ conceptions of time

Author : Hubert Krivine
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1781687986
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Earth written by Hubert Krivine and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our planet's elliptical orbit around the Sun and its billions-of-years existence are facts we take for granted, matters every literate high school student is expected to grasp. But humanity's struggle towards these scientific truths lasted millennia. Few of us have more than the faintest notion of the path we have travelled. Hubert Krivine tells the story of the thinkers and scientists whose work allowed our species to put an age to the planet and pinpoint our place in the solar system. It is a history of bold innovators, with a broad cast of contributors - not only Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but Halley, Kelvin, Darwin and Rutherford, among many others. Courage, iniquity, religious dogmatism, genius and blind luck all played a part. This was an epic struggle to free the mind from the constraints of cant, ideology and superstition. From this history, Krivine delineates an invaluable philosophy of science, one today under threat from irrationalism and the fundamentalist movements of East and West, which threaten both what we have attained at great cost and what we still have to learn. Scientific progress is not a sufficient condition for social progress; but it is a necessary one. The Earth is not merely a history of scientific learning, but a stirring defence of Enlightenment values in the quest for human advancement.

Author : Ronald Wright
Publisher : House of Anansi
ISBN 13 : 0887848435
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Short History of Progress written by Ronald Wright and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2004-10-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future? In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Author : John M. Henshaw
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801883750
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Does Measurement Measure Up? written by John M. Henshaw and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-05-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henshaw examines the ways in which measurement makes sense or creates nonsense.

Author : Craig Benjamin
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100018658X
Total Pages : 507 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Big History written by Craig Benjamin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Big History guides readers though the variety of themes and concepts that structure contemporary scholarship in the field of big history. The volume is divided into five parts, each representing current and evolving areas of interest to the community, including big history’s relationship to science, social science, the humanities, and the future, as well as teaching big history and ‘little big histories’. Considering an ever-expanding range of theoretical, pedagogical and research topics, the book addresses such questions as what is the relationship between big history and scientific research, how are big historians working with philosophers and religious thinkers to help construct ‘meaning’, how are leading theoreticians making sense of big history and its relationship to other creation narratives and paradigms, what is ‘little big history’, and how does big history impact on thinking about the future? The book highlights the place of big history in historiographical traditions and the ways in which it can be used in education and public discourse across disciplines and at all levels. A timely collection with contributions from leading proponents in the field, it is the ideal guide for those wanting to engage with the theories and concepts behind big history.

Author : Ronald E. Martin
Publisher : Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN 13 : 128414092X
Total Pages : 616 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Earth's Evolving Systems written by Ronald E. Martin and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earth’s Evolving Systems: The History of Planet Earth, Second Edition is an introductory text designed for popular courses in undergraduate Earth history. Written from a “systems perspective,” it provides coverage of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere, and discussion of how those systems interacted over the course of geologic time.