Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters - Couverture rigide

Rudwick, Martin J. S.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 022620393X ISBN 13 : 9780226203935

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious understand it all. But how was it discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? And what kinds of people have sought to reconstruct this past that no human witnessed or recorded? In this sweeping and magisterial book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth's history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful. Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative then turns to the crucial period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when inquisitive intellectuals, who came to call themselves "geologists," began to interpret rocks and fossils, mountains and volcanoes, as natural archives of Earth's history. He then shows how this geological evidence was used - and is still being used - to reconstruct a history of the earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history itself. Along the way, Rudwick defies the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and reveals that the modern scientific account of the Earth's deep history retains strong roots in Judaeo-Christian ideas. Extensively illustrated, Earth's Deep History is an engaging and impressive capstone to Rudwick's distinguished career. Though the story of the Earth is inconceivable in length, Rudwick moves with grace from the earliest imaginings of our planet's deep past to today's scientific discoveries, proving that this is a tale at once timeless and timely.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Martin J. S. Rudwick is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, San Diego and affiliated scholar in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His many other books include Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution and Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 022620393X
• ISBN 13: 9780226203935
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 392
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible