Chapter 7 Chapter 5: People Who Knock Stones

Just as Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, another momentous moment loomed in Edinburgh, 650 kilometers away, with the death of James Hutton.This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news for the scientific community, because it paved the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton's work without a doubt. Hutton was unquestionably a sharp-eyed, very talkative man, a pleasant companion.He is unmatched in his knowledge of the mysterious and slow formation of the Earth.Unfortunately, he doesn't write down his insights in a form that everyone can basically understand.One biographer sighed and said that he "almost completely knew how to use language".He fell asleep almost every time he wrote a line.In his 1795 masterpiece, The Essay on the Earth with Proofs and Explanations, he discusses... oops, a question:

The world we live in is not made of the matter that made up the immediate predecessor of the earth at that time, but is made of matter going back from the present to what we consider to be the third generation of the earth, which appeared before the land emerged from the sea, And our current land is still under the sea. Almost alone, though, and very brilliantly, he pioneered geology and changed our understanding of the Earth.Hutton was born in a wealthy Scottish family in 1726, enjoying comfortable material conditions, so he was able to spend most of his life in a relaxed way of working and improving his knowledge in an all-round way.He studied medicine, but found that he didn't like medicine, so he switched to agriculture.He has been farming in a deliberate and scientific way on his family farm in Berwickshire. In 1768, tired of the land and the sheep, he moved to Edinburgh.He established a very successful business producing ammonium chloride from soot and was busy with various scientific studies.At the time, Edinburgh was a center of intellectual activity, and Hutton was at home in this hopeful environment.He became a leading member of a society called the Oyster Club.There he spent many evenings with others, including the economist Adam Smith, the chemist Joseph Blake and the philosopher David Hume, with the occasional presence of Benjamin Franklin and James Watt.

According to the tradition of that era, Hutton was interested in almost everything, from mineralogy to metaphysics.Among them, he experimented with chemicals, investigated the methods of mining coal mines and building canals, inspected salt mines, speculated on genetic mechanisms, collected fossils, and proposed laws about the composition and motion of rain and air. aspects of the theory.However, he was most interested in geology. Among the many intriguing questions of that inquisitive age, one has long perplexed people—namely, why ancient clam shells and other fossilized sea creatures are so often found on mountain tops.How the hell did they get there?

Many thought they had found the answer.They are divided into two opposing camps.Hydrogenesisists believe that everything on Earth, including ocean shells at high altitudes, can be explained by rising and falling sea levels.They argue that mountains, hills and other landforms are as old as the Earth itself, with some changes as it was washed by water during the Global Flood. The opposite is the pyrogenist.They believe that there are many dynamic agents, among which volcanoes and earthquakes are constantly changing the surface of the planet, but apparently have nothing to do with the distant sea.The igneous theory also raises a question that is difficult to answer: Where did the water go when there was no flood?If there is sometimes enough water to submerge the Alps, where does it go after calm, as now?They believe that the Earth is acted upon by forces deep within and by forces on the surface.However, they could not convincingly explain how the clam shells made their way to the top of the mountain.

It was in the process of considering these questions that Hutton came up with a series of extraordinary insights.Looking at his farmland, he saw that the rocks had been eroded into soil, and the soil particles were washed away by streams and rivers and carried elsewhere to be deposited.He realized that if this process continued until the Earth's natural demise, the Earth would eventually be very smooth.However, there are hills all around him.Obviously, there must be some other process, some form of renewal and uplift, creating new hills and new mountains, and so on and on.He believes that the marine fossils on the summit were not deposited during the flood, but were raised together with the mountain itself.He also speculated that geothermal heat from the Earth's interior created new rocks and continents, jacking up new mountains.To put it mildly, geologists are reluctant to understand the full implications of this insight until 200 years later.At this time, they finally adopted the theory of plate tectonics.In particular, Hutton's theory suggests that the formation of the Earth took a long time, much longer than anyone imagined.There are so many insights here that could revolutionize our understanding of this planet.

In 1785 Hutton wrote up his views in a long paper, which was read at several meetings of the Royal Society in Edinburgh.It was barely noticed.The reason is not hard to find.In part, this is how he read his thesis to his audience: In one case, the forces of formation are inside independently existing objects.This is because, after the object is activated by heat, the cracks that constitute the veins are formed through the reaction of the specific substances of the object.In the other case, too, the cause is external to the body in which the veins are formed.The most violent breaking and tearing has taken place; but that cause is still working; it does not appear in the veins, for it is not within the solid bodies of our earth where minerals or veins of particular matter are found. gaps and in each fault.

Needless to say, almost no one in the audience understood what he was talking about.Friends encouraged him to develop his theories a bit, in the hope that he would happen to make it clearer in a larger space.This is very touching.Hutton spent the next ten years preparing his magnum opus, which was published in two volumes in 1795. Combined, the two books are nearly 1,000 pages and far worse than his most pessimistic friend feared, and it’s incredible.In addition, nearly half of the content of this work is quoted from French sources and still appears in French.The third volume was so unattractive that it was not published until 1899, more than a century after Hutton's death.The fourth and final volume was never published.Hutton's Essay on the Earth is well-qualified as the least-read major scientific work (if there aren't a ton of other such books, so to speak).Even the greatest geologist of the 19th century, Charles Lyle, who had read everything, admitted that he couldn't read this book.

Fortunately, Hutton found a Boswellian figure in John Playfair.Playfair was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend of Hutton's.Not only does he write beautiful prose, but - thanks to having been around Hutton for many years - he knows, for the most part, what Hutton actually wants to say. In 1802, five years after Hutton's death, Playfair published a short version of Hutton's principle, entitled "A Note on Hutton's Theory of the Earth".This book is popular with those interested in geology.Such people were few in 1802.However, things are about to change.So how did things change?

In 1807, 13 like-minded people in London met at the Masonic Hotel in Longacre Street, Covent Garden Square, and formed a dining club, which was later named the Geological Society.The Society meets once a month to exchange views on geology over a glass or two of Madeira and a social meal.The meal was deliberately priced at an expensive fifteen shillings so as to keep the uninitiated at bay.However, it soon became clear that there needed to be a suitable institution with a permanent headquarters where new discoveries could be shared and discussed.In less than a decade, it had grown to 400 members - still gentlemen, of course - and the Geological Society looked set to dwarf the Royal Society as the country's premier scientific society.

Members meet twice a month from November to June, because by this time virtually everyone is out and doing field work all summer.Mind you, these people aren't out looking for ore to make money, and in most cases aren't even academics.It is nothing more than a hobby pursued on a less professional level by gentlemen with money and time.By 1830, it had grown to 745 members, and that would never happen again in the world. Such a situation is unimaginable now, but geology energized nineteenth-century men—and totally captured their attention—in a way that no science has ever done before, and probably never will. In 1839, Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a thick, heavy book on a type of rock called graywacke.It was an instant bestseller, with four editions in short order, though it sold for eight guineas a copy, and in true Huttonian fashion it was unreadable.

(Even Murchison's supporters admit that it has "no literary charm".) And when the great Charles Lyall went to America in 1841 to give a series of lectures in Boston, 3,000 people attended each time. An audience packed into Lowell College to listen in silence as he described the marine zeolite and the tremors caused by the earthquake in Campania. Throughout modern thought, and especially in England, learned men go to the country to do what they call "rock-knocking" work.The job was done with dignity.They tend to be attractively dressed: top hats and black suits.The only exception was the Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, who was accustomed to field work in his doctor's suit. The wild has attracted many eminent men, notably the above-mentioned Murchison, who spent perhaps the first half of his life, nearly thirty years, chasing foxes on horseback, and turning airborne birds into fluttering tufts of feathers with a shotgun .Apart from reading The Times and playing a good hand of cards, he showed no signs of using his head.Then he became interested in rocks, and with astonishing speed he became a giant of geological thought. Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, an early socialist who wrote provocative pamphlets such as The Bloodless Revolution. In 1794, there was a crazy-sounding conspiracy called the Airgun Project, in which someone planned to shoot King George III in the neck with a poisoned dart while he was watching a play in his box at the theater.Parkinson was implicated in the affair, brought before the Privy Council for questioning, and nearly sent to Australia in chains.However, the charges against him were later dropped.He gradually adopted a more conservative attitude towards life, and became interested in geology, and eventually became one of the founders of the Geological Society and the author of an important geological work "Organic Remains of the Last World".For half a century, the book was printed without stopping.He never caused trouble again.However, we remember him today because of his epoch-making research on a disease.The disease was called "parkinsonism" at the time, but has since been called Parkinson's syndrome. (Parkinson is also slightly famous in another way. In 1785, he may well have become the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a prize sale. The museum is located in Leicester Square in London, originally It was founded by Ashton Lever, but Lever's unrestrained collection of natural treasures ended up ruining his fortune. Parkinson kept the museum until 1805, and when he could no longer maintain it, he sold the collection.) A man less striking in character than Parkinson, but more influential than all geologists combined at the time, was Charles Lyle.Lyle was born in the year of Hutton's death, only 113 kilometers away from Hutton's family in the village of Kinnodi.His parents were Scottish, but he grew up in the far south - the New Forest in Hampshire, England, because his mother thought Scots were lazy and drinkers.In general, he was exactly like the gentleman scientist of the 19th century, and he also came from a well-to-do and active-minded family.His father, also named Charles, was a well-known man who studied the poet Dante and the Moss (that is, Lyle Moss, on which most people who go to the English countryside sit, is named after him) primary authority.Influenced by his father, Lyall developed an interest in natural history, but it was at Oxford, under the influence of William Buckland—the Buckland in his flowing robes—that Lyell began to devote his life's work to Energy was devoted to geology. Buckland was more or less a charming eccentric.He had some real achievements, but he was at least remembered for his eccentricity.He was especially known for keeping a herd of wild animals, some of which were large and some very dangerous.He is also famous for eating every animal that has ever existed since the beginning of time.Depending on his whim and availability, he would entertain his family with roasted guinea pigs, battered rats, roasted hedgehogs or boiled Southeast Asian sea cucumbers.Buckland thought they all tasted good, with the exception of the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting.He is almost bound to become an authority on fossilized dung, and there is a table at home made almost entirely of such specimens collected. Even when he was engaged in serious scientific activity, his ways were generally eccentric.Once, in the middle of the night, Buckland woke up his wife in excitement and exclaimed: "My God, I think the footprints on the fossil must be the footprints of a turtle." The couple hurried to the kitchen in their pajamas.Mrs. Buckland kneaded the dough and spread it on the table, and the Reverend Buckland brought the home tortoise.They threw the turtle on the dough and drove it on.They were delighted to find that its footprints were exactly the same as those on the fossil Buckland had been studying.Charles Darwin thought Buckland was a buffoon - that's his word - but Lyall seemed to find him an inspiration to him, and liked him enough to go to Scotland with him in 1824.It was after that trip to Scotland that Lyle decided to give up his legal career and devote his full time to geology. Lyle was severely near-sighted and had spent most of his life squinting painfully, giving him a scowling look. (Eventually, he lost his eyesight altogether.) He also had a slightly eccentricity in that when he was lost in thought, he would strike unimaginable poses on the furniture—either across two chairs, or ( In the words of his friend Darwin) "the head rests on the surface of the chair and the body is stretched out straight".Once lost in thought, he tends to slide slowly out of the chair, with his hips almost touching the floor.Lyle's only job in life was as professor of geology at King's College, University of London, from 1831 to 1833.It was during this time that he wrote Principles of Geology, which was published in 3 volumes during 1831-1833.In many ways this book consolidates and expands on insights first developed by Hutton a generation ago. (Although Lyell never read Hutton's work in the original text, he studied Playfair's rewrite with interest.) Between Hutton's and Lyell's times a new revolution in geology took place. controversy.It has largely replaced the past debates of hydrogenesis and pyrogenesis, which are often mixed together.The new battle became that of catastrophism and uniformitarianism.Such a name for an important and protracted debate seems a little underwhelming.Catastrophists - as the name suggests - believe that the Earth was formed by sudden catastrophic events - primarily floods.This is why people often confuse catastrophe theory with hydrogenesis theory.Catastrophism especially caters to the psychology of priests like Buckland, so that they can incorporate the biblical flood of Noah's time into serious scientific discussions.Uniformitarians, on the contrary, believe that changes on the earth are formed gradually, and almost all geological changes are slow and take a long time.It was Hutton, not so much Lyell, who first advanced this view, but most people read Lyell, and so in most people's minds, then and now, he is a modern Father of geology. According to Lyle, Earth changes consistently and slowly—everything that has happened in the past can be explained by what is still happening today.Lyall and his disciples not only despised catastrophism, but hated it.Catastrophists believe that extinctions are part of a series of processes in which animals are constantly dying out and being replaced by new ones - a view wryly likened by naturalist T.H. Huxley to "whist A succession of winning hands in a card game, at the end of which the players overturn the table and demand a new deck."It would be too cliché to explain the unknown in this way. "Never was there a dogma more calculated to encourage laziness and less curiosity than this," said Lyall with a snort. Lyle's mistakes are not rare.He didn't explain convincingly how mountains formed, and he didn't see glaciers as an agent of change.Unwilling to accept Agassiz's ideas about ice ages -- which he dismisses as "earth cooling" -- he insists that mammals "are to be found in the oldest fossil beds."He rejected the notion of sudden death of animals and plants, arguing that all major groups of animals - mammals, reptiles, fish, etc. - have existed simultaneously since ancient times.On these matters he was finally proved to be completely wrong. Yet you can hardly overstate Lyle's influence. "Principles of Geology" published 12 editions during his lifetime; until the 20th century, some of the ideas contained in the book were still regarded as canon by the geological community.Darwin also took a copy of "Principles of Geology" with him on his "Hound Dog" voyage around the world, and it was the first edition of the book.He later wrote: "The greatest virtue of the Principia is that it changes a man's whole state of mind; so that when you see something Lyle has never seen, you partly learn from his His eyes." In short, he regarded Lyall almost as a god, as many of his generation did. When geologists had to jettison parts of his theory in the 1980s to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, they were literally miserable.This speaks volumes for Lyle's influence.However, that is another story. Meanwhile, geology has a massive taxonomic work to do, and it's not all smooth sailing.From the beginning, geologists have wanted to classify rocks by the ages in which they were formed, but there has often been fierce debate—and a protracted one—over how to date them, which has come to be known as "mud rocks." The Great Controversy of the Basin Period".The debate arose when Adam Sedgwick of the University of Cambridge asserted that a layer of rock was Cambrian, while Roderick Murchison believed it to be entirely Silurian.The debate went on for years and became more and more heated. "Basher is a bum," Murchison fumed in a letter to a friend. In The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin JS Ruddick describes this debate excellently and somewhat depressingly.One need only glance at the titles of the chapters of the book to get a sense of the intensity of these feelings.The first few chapters have milder titles, such as "Gentlemen's Debate Stage" and "Deciphering the Mystery of Grewwacke," but then come "Defending Grewwacke and Assaulting Grewwacke," "Criticism and Rebuttal," "Spreading Viciousness." The Rumors of the War", "Weaver Withdraws the Heresy", "The Arrogance to Kill the Countryman" (in case you still doubt that this is not a war), "Murchison Launches the Battle of the Rhineland", etc.The debate was settled in 1879 by simply adding a period between the Cambrian and Silurian: the Ordovician. In the early days of the discipline, the British were most active, and so British names predominate in geological terms. The Devonian (i.e. Devonian) lineage, of course, originated in Devon, England.The Cambrian period comes from what the Romans called Wales, while the Ordovician and Silurian periods recall ancient Welsh tribes: the Ordovicians and Silurians.However, with the later rise of geology elsewhere, names gradually emerged around the world.The Jurassic period is related to the Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland.The Permian brings to mind Perm in the Ural Mountains of Russia, while the Cretaceous (from the Latin Cretaceous) was named by a Belgian geologist, himself a pretty name called JJ de Omarima S Dholoy. Originally, geological history was divided into four periods: the First Period, the Second Period, the Tertiary Period and the Quaternary Period.This system is too simple, so the life is not too long.Geologists were quick to replace this division with new ones.The First and Second Epochs are completely out of use, and some people in the Fourth Epoch no longer use them, but some still use them.Today, only Tertiary is still widely used, although it doesn't represent anything of Tertiary anymore. Lyle used new units in Principia called "epochs" or "periods" to cover the epochs after the dinosaurs, among them Pleistocene ("recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene The Oligocene ("quite near") and the ambiguous Oligocene ("somewhat near"). Today, geological epochs are generally divided into four major chunks called "ages": Precambrian, Paleozoic (from the Greek word meaning "ancient life"), Mesozoic ("middle life"), and Cenozoic ( "New Life").These four generations are divided into 12-20 parts, usually called "Ji", sometimes also called "Department".Most of them are more familiar: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian, etc. Then there are what Lyle calls "epochs" -- Pleistocene, Miocene, etc. -- names used only to refer to the most recent (but palaeontologically active) 65 million years; A more detailed classification is called "period" or "generation".Most of them are named after places, which are almost always a mouthful to read: the Illinois, Des Moines, Croy, Kimmelridge, etc., all have the same characteristics.According to John McPhee, there are "hundreds" of such names.Fortunately, unless you've made geology your major, you're unlikely to hear those names ever again. To make things even more confusing, the "period" or "generation" in North America differs from that in Europe, and often overlaps roughly in time.Thus, the Cincinnati period in North America is largely equivalent to the Ashgilian period in Europe, plus a little earlier Carradocian period. Moreover, different textbooks and different people have different names for all these, so some authorities propose 7 generations, while others are satisfied with 4 generations.In some books, you will also find that instead of Tertiary and Quaternary, lines of different lengths are used instead, called Lower Tertiary and Upper Tertiary.Some people also divide the Precambrian into two generations, namely the very ancient Archaean and the more recent Proterozoic.Sometimes you'll also see the term "Phanerozoic" used to cover the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic. Moreover, all of this is only used as a unit of time.There is another set of rock units called series, section and period.Moreover, there are differences between early and late (referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to rock formations).To the non-expert, this is a piece of cake; to the geologist, it can all be emotional stuff. "I've seen grown-ups fight over a millisecond in the history of life." Britain's Richard Foty on the protracted 20th-century debate over the Cambrian-Ordovician boundary Wrote like this. Today, we can date at least some advanced techniques.For most of the 19th century, geologists could only rely on speculation.They can arrange all kinds of rocks and fossils by age, but it's very frustrating not to know how long those ages are.When Buckland speculated on the age of an ichthyosaur skeleton, he could only assume that it lived about "10,000 or more times 10,000" years ago. While there is no reliable way to date it, there is no shortage of people willing to give it a try. In 1650, Archbishop James Usher of the Church of Ireland made the most famous early attempt.He conducted careful research on the Bible and other historical sources, and finally concluded in a tome called "The Chronicles of the Old Testament" that the earth was created at noon on October 23, 4004 BC.Since then, historians and textbook authors have continued to use this date as a joke. By the way, there is a long-standing myth - it has been mentioned in many serious books - that Usher's views dominated science for a long time until the 19th century.It was Lyle who set things right.As a typical example, Stephen Jay Gould quotes a line from a popular book from the 1980s in "The Arrow of Time": "Before Lyle published his book, most thinkers have accepted the idea that the Earth is young." It is not.As Martin JS Ruddick puts it, "No geologist in any country would advocate limiting time-marking to the literal interpretation of Genesis if his work were Words that geologists take seriously". Even Reverend Buckland, a pious man in the 19th century, believed that nowhere in the Bible does it mention that God created the world on the first day, only "in the beginning".That beginning, he suggested, may have lasted "hundreds and tens of millions of years." Everyone thinks the earth is very old.The only question is: how old is it? On the issue of determining the age of this planet, there was a more reasonable view in the early days.It was brought up by the ever reliable Edmund Halley. In 1715, he proposed that if you divide the total amount of salt in the world's oceans by the annual increase, you will find the number of years the oceans have existed, and thus give an approximate estimate of the age of the earth.The theory is fascinating, but unfortunately, no one knows exactly how much salt is in the ocean, nor how much it increases every year, which makes this experiment impossible to put into practice. The first reasonably scientific attempt was made by the French count Georges-Louis Leclerc of Buffon in the 1770s.It's been known for a long time that the Earth emits a considerable amount of heat -- anyone who's been in a coal mine knows that -- but there's no way to estimate the rate of dissipation.Buffon first heated the sphere to the point of incandescence during the experiment, and then estimated the rate of heat loss by touching it (perhaps gently at first) as it cooled.Based on this experiment, he speculated that the age of the earth is between 75000-168000 years.This is of course a vast underestimation; however, it is a radical insight.Buffon found that he was in danger of being excommunicated if he published this opinion.A practical man, he quickly apologized for his ill-considered heresy, and then happily repeated it in subsequent writings. By the mid-19th century, most scholars believed that the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even tens of millions of years old, but probably not that old.So when Charles Darwin declared in 1859 that, according to his calculations, the geological process of creating the Wealds - a region in southern England that includes Kent, Surrey and Sussex - took 306,662,400 When it was completed in a year, people couldn't help being surprised.This conclusion is remarkable, partly because he said it so precisely, but even more because he blatantly disregarded accepted beliefs about the age of the earth.As a result, it was hotly contested, and Darwin retracted his opinion in the third edition of the book.However, the problem remains in practice. Darwin and his friends in geology hoped that the earth was very old, but no one could think of a way. The question aroused Lord Kelvin (who was certainly a great man, but was not raised to peerage until 1892, at the age of 68, near the end of his life, but I am here, as usual, retroactively Unfortunately for Darwin and for progress.Kelvin was one of the most remarkable figures of the 19th century - and of any century.The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz - himself a master of science - wrote that Kelvin was the most "comprehensive, insightful and active-minded" person he had ever met. "In front of him, I sometimes feel like I'm dumb." He said with frustration. This mentality is understandable, as Kelvin is indeed a Victorian Superman.He was born in Belfast in 1824, the son of a professor of mathematics at the Royal Academy, who was soon transferred to Glasgow.Kelvin proved himself to be a child prodigy, attending Glasgow University at a young age (10). In his early 20s, he had already studied at institutions in London and Paris, graduated from Cambridge University (where he won top prizes in rowing and mathematics, and found time to start a music club), was elected to Peter College. Researcher, author (in English and French) of more than 10 papers on pure and applied mathematics.These works were so original that he had to publish them anonymously so as not to embarrass his elders.He returned to Glasgow at the age of 22 as a professor of natural philosophy.He has held the position for the next 53 years. Over the course of a long career (he lived until 1907, at the age of 83), he wrote 661 papers, received a total of 69 patents (and thus became very wealthy), and earned a reputation in nearly every discipline of physics.Among them, he proposed a method, which later directly led to the invention of refrigeration technology; designed the absolute temperature scale, which is still named after him; invented the supercharging device, which made it possible to send telegrams across the ocean; Improvements, from inventing a popular nautical compass to creating the first depth finder.These are only his practical results. His work on the theory of electromagnetism, thermodynamics1 and the waves of light was equally revolutionary.He actually had only one flaw, and that was his inability to calculate the age of the Earth.This problem took up much of the rest of his life, but he never came up with a more accurate figure. In 1862, in an article for a popular magazine called "Macmillan", he first proposed that the age of the earth was 98 million years, but cautiously believed that this number could be as low as 20 million years, and as large as 20 million years old. Up to 400 million years.He was also careful to admit that his calculations could be wrong if "the Creator's great storehouse contained information which we do not have at present" - but he clearly considered that impossible. As time passed, Kelvin's conclusions became more accurate and less correct.He kept dropping his estimates, from a maximum of 400 million years to 100 million years, then to 50 million years, and finally in 1897 to a mere 24 million years.Kelvin is not doing whatever he wants, just because physics cannot explain why a giant like the sun can burn continuously for tens of millions of years without exhausting its fuel.He therefore took it for granted that the sun and its planets must be relatively young. The problem is that almost all fossils prove to contradict this conclusion.And all of a sudden, the 19th century found tons of fossils.