num_pages: 288
description: Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting writes Doug Macdougall. It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper. In Nature's Clocks Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) datingthe best known of these methodsand several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances explaining how they reveal the age 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 themselvesJames Hutton William Smith Arthur Holmes Ernest Rutherford Willard Libby and Clair PattersonMacdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science's most significant a timescale for the earth's evolution and human prehistory.
language: English
title: Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything
publisher: University of California Press