In search of lost time

143 Pages·2019·10.446 MB·English

by  York, Derek

In Search of Lost Time
Derek York
University of Toronto
Institute of Physics Publishing
Bristol and Philadelphia
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
@ Derek York 1997
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 7503 0475 8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available
Published by Institute of Physics Publishing, wholly owned by
The Institute of Physics, London
Institute of Physics Publishing, Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol
BS1 6BE, UK
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Printed in the UK by Cambridge University Press
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
To Lydia, Link, Katherine and Joseph
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 The pyramids, Stonehenge and the Chinese oracle bones-
same time next year 1
The pyramids of Giza 2
Stonehenge 5
The Chinese oracle bones and the evolution of calendars 16
2 The age of the earth; the Genesis burden 22
The removal of the Genesis burden 24
Kelvin’s evolution 27
3 The age of radioactivity 31
Rutherford, Soddy and Boltwood meet the Marx brothers 35
4 How do you date an earth? 38
The impact of meteorites 42
Footnote 45
5 Modern-day adherents of Julius Africanus 46
6 A carbon time machine 52
7 Children of time 57
Dating our human ancestors 58
Potassium-argon dating 58
Argon-argon dating 60
Single-crystal laser dating 61
The family tree 62
Crossing the Rubicon 64
8 Dinosaurs, meteorites and all that jazz 66
Worlds in collision 66
vii
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
viii Contents
Nemesis 70
9 Atomic ‘reactor’ operated 2 billion years ago 78
10 Gulliver’s travels and Martian moons-time for Kepler 82
11 Chaos and time 88
An outrageous statement 94
12 Time in the quantum world 97
Man who made sense of the mad microworld 97
Schrodinger’s cat 101
Quantum mechanics explains radioactivity 102
Alice in quantum land 104
13 Impossible things before breakfast 107
Back to the future 111
14 Much ado about cannonballs (and democracies); last exit to
Pisa, next exit black holes 113
Bleak holes-time’s grave 116
Time to meet black holes 118
Black holes and twins 122
15 The arrow of time 124
Entropy, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch 129
16 Time enough for our universe 130
The constants of nature 131
Index 136
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
Preface
For over a third of a century my life has been spent in search of lost
time. In 1957, Professor L R Wager, head of the Department of Geology
at Oxford, invited me to join a small group of scientists who were
engaged in setting up radioactive dating techniques in his laboratory.
Having just graduated in physics, this seemed like a large step into
the unknown. However, luckily, I accepted his invitation and have
ever since been in pursuit of thousands and millions, and thousands of
millions, of years. This book is a reflection of my obsession with
time and its measurement. It will take you from the pyramids of
Egypt, through Stonehenge, the North China plain, to the universities
of Cambridge, McGill, Chicago and Toronto, to the Patent Office in
Berne, and back to the Ethiopian desert on the banks of the Awash
River. On this time-odyssey you will enter the mind-bending universe
of the special and general theories of relativity, the ghostly world of
quantum mechanics and the unpredictable haunts of chaos. You will
have good companions to share and illuminate the path-fiom Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to
J B Priestley’s Dangerous Corner. You will meet the father of master-
spy Kim Philby in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the fantasist Velikovsky
in the clouds, and Newton, Darwin, Rutherford, Einstein and the great
earth scientists of this century who fathomed the depths of lost time
and discovered the age of the earth. May you enjoy your search for
lost time as much as I have mine.
Derek York
Toronto, May 1997
ix
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my wife Lydia and son Link for their continuing
encouragement during the writing of this book. Many of my ideas
were shaped in discussions with them. Terry Christian of The Globe
and Mail was a pleasure to work with and is a great friend. Ruth
Bobbis and Maria Wong did an excellent job of typing the manuscript
and were helpful in many ways. Sarah Peat was a great help in finding
illustrations and obtaining permissions. Peter Binfield and Joanna Thorn
of Institute of Physics Publishing sustained me with their enthusiasm
for the book and their efforts during its final production.
Finally, I would like to thank Mike and Sore1 Garvin for making their
beautiful cottage on the beach at Clifton, Capetown available to us.
Their generosity and the siting of the cottage on the Cape Granite
(which crystallized at the dawning of the Cambrian period) inspired the
planning and the writing of a significant portion of In Search of Lost
Time.
I gratefully acknowledge permission to use illustrations from the
following sources:
Figure 1.6 by courtesy of The George Crofts Collection, Royal Ontario
Museum.
Figure 5.1 is a computer graphic by Khader Khan and Raoul Cunha.
Figures 7.2 and 7.3 by courtesy of the Institute of Human Origins,
Berkeley.
xi
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xii Acknowledgments
Figure 8.1 by courtesy of Richard Grieve, Natural Resources Canada.
Figure 16.1 by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, LondodArt Resource, New
York.
Chapters 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14 were based in whole or in part
on articles by the author which have appeared in The Globe and Mail,
Canada. Chapter 5 is based on an article by the author which appeared
in the American Geophysical Union’s Eos. I am grateful for their
permission to use this material.
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd
CHAPTER 1
THE PYRAMIDS,
STONEHENGE AND THE
CHINESE ORACLE BONES
-SAME TIME NEXT YEAR
Throughout his existence in what we might call ‘civilized’ conditions,
man has been obsessed with two contrasting aspects of time: its cyclic
repetitive nature on the one hand (as exemplified by the rising of the
sun above the horizon every day, its setting each night, the monthly
waxing and waning of the moon, the return of the seasons, the yearly
flooding of the Nile, etc), and its linear non-cyclic non-repetitive nature
on the other (as represented most dramatically by the one birth and one
death that we all experience).
We see this same contrast in modern cosmologies, where some see
infinitely cycling universes with endlessly repeating space and time (see
chapter 16), while others envisage a universe born only once, expanding
for ever into maximum disorder. In this chapter we look at our earliest
struggles to come to grips with these ideas, and our efforts to mark
the passage of time, through the testimony of the pyramids of Egypt,
Stonehenge and the Chinese oracle bones.
The pyramids reflect both these sides of time’s coinage. The Egyptian
kings sought to defeat the grasp of death and hoped that the pyramids
(figure 1.1) would protect their bodies against the linear ravages of time
and enable them to return to some form of life, perhaps like the sun on
the first day of spring, the vernal equinox. Remarkably, they oriented
their pyramids almost perfectly to face the first and last rays of the sun
on this day of renewal.
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2 Pyramids, Stonehenge & Chinese oracles
Figure 1.1: The pyramids of Giza.
In contrast, we shall see that, rather than marking the equinoxes,
the builders of Stonehenge marked midsummer’s morning and the
metronomic motions of the sun and moon along the eastern and western
horizons during the year.
Finally, where the Egyptians and ancient Britons built massive stone
monuments to time the movements of the sun and moon, the Chinese
timed the earth’s rotation with a simple stick and obtained results in
extraordinary agreement with modern values.
The pyramids of Giza
The pyramids of Egypt, about 80 of which are known, lie scattered
along the fringe of the desert to the west of the River Nile. They were
the product of the so-called Old Kingdom which stretched from roughly
2700 to 2200 BC. The pyramids were tombs of kings and queens and
resulted from the great concern of the Egyptians with the idea of life
after death.
During the Pyramid Age there were two dominating religious cults: the
Copyright © 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd