Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure The Age Of Almost Everything

Description: Quoted from the inside flyleaf: "Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Dough Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells the fascinating story of scientists seeking to understand the past and shows how they arrived at the ingenious techniques they use to determine the age of objects and organisms. Focusing on radiocarbon (C-14) dating - the best known of these methods and the only one that can directly date once-living material - and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the past century's advances, explaining how scientists use radioactivity to determine the ages of our fossil ancestors such as "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs' extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the beginning of the Earth's history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these advances through the stories of the scientists themselves, Macdougall shows how such major figures as James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science's most significant accomplishments: a time scale for the Earth, evolution and human prehistory."

Price: 8 USD

Location: San Jose, California

End Time: 2024-09-10T23:01:29.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.38 USD