Chapter 11 Chapter 9 The Powerful Atom

While Einstein and Hubble were prolific in understanding the large-scale structure of the universe, others were struggling to understand something close at hand and, from their perspective, very distant: tiny and forever The mysterious atom. The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once discovered that if you had to condense the history of science into one important sentence, it would be: "Everything is made of atoms." Everywhere Atoms, atoms make up everything.You look around and it's all atoms.Not only are solids like walls, tables, and sofas atomic, but so is the air in between.Atoms exist in abundance, in unimaginable abundance.

The basic working form of an atom is a molecule (from Latin meaning "little mass of matter").A molecule is just two or more atoms that work together in a relatively stable form: add an oxygen atom to two hydrogen atoms, and you get a water molecule.Chemists tend to think in terms of molecules rather than elements, just as writers tend to think in terms of words rather than letters, so they count molecules.The number of molecules is huge to say the least.At sea level and at a temperature of zero degrees Celsius, a cubic centimeter of air (roughly the space occupied by a sugar cube) contains as many as 4 molecules.

50 billion trillion.And there are so many molecules per cubic centimeter of space around you.Think about how many cubic centimeters there are in the world outside your window -- how many sugar cubes would it take to fill your field of view.Then think again, how many such spaces are needed to form the universe.All in all, atoms are many. Atoms are also incredibly long-lived.Because atoms are so long-lived, they can literally roam around.Every atom in you must have traveled through stars and been part of a million species of living beings before becoming you.Each of us has a large number of atoms; these atoms are very strong and can be reused after we die; of the atoms in us, a considerable number--by some estimates, as many as a billion atoms in each of us-- -Originally probably Shakespeare's atoms, Sakyamuni, Genghis Khan, Beethoven, and whoever you name historical figures contributed another billion atoms each. (Obviously has to be a historical figure, since it takes about a few decades for atoms to be completely redistributed; no matter how much you want to, you can't have an Elvis Presley atom in you yet.) Therefore, we are all reincarnations of other people - albeit short-lived.When we die, our atoms are scattered to find new uses elsewhere—to be part of a leaf or some other human body or a drop of dew.

And the atom itself will actually live forever.In fact, no one knows the lifespan of an atom, but according to Martin Rees, it has a lifespan of about 1035 years—a number so large that even I am happy to express it in mathematical notation. Also, atoms are small -- very small indeed. 500,000 atoms lined up can't cover a human hair.On such a scale, an atom is unimaginably small.However, we can certainly give it a try. Start with 1 mm, which is such a long line:-.Now, let's imagine that this line is divided into 1000 segments of equal width.The width of each segment is 1 micron.That's the size of the microbe.For example, a standard paramecium -- a small single-celled freshwater organism -- is about 2 microns across, or 0.002 millimeters, which is incredibly small indeed.If you want to see paramecium swimming in a drop of water with the naked eye, you have to magnify the drop to 12 meters wide.However, if you want to see the atoms in the same drop, you have to magnify the drop to a width of 24 kilometers.

In other words, atoms exist on another tiny scale entirely.To know the size of an atom, you'd have to take something this micron-sized and cut it into 10,000 smaller things.That's the size of an atom: one ten-millionth of a millimeter.Something so small is far beyond our imagination.However, just remember that one atom is to the above-mentioned 1 mm line what the thickness of a piece of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building in New York, and you have a rough idea of ​​its size. Of course, atoms are so useful because they are numerous and extremely long-lived, and difficult to detect and recognize because they are so small.First to discover that atoms have three properties—that they are small, numerous, and virtually indestructible—and that everything is made of atoms, not Antoine-Lavoisier, or even Henri Lavoisier, as you might think. Cavendish or Humphrey Davy, but an amateur, little-educated English Quaker named John Dalton, whom we first mention in Chapter 7 Got his name.

Dalton's hometown is on the edge of the English Lake District, not far from Cockermouth.He was born in 1766 into a poor but pious family of Quaker weavers. (The poet William Wordsworth also came to Cockermouth four years later.) He was a brilliant student - indeed he was, and at the young age of 12 he became a pupil at the local Quaker school. headmaster.It might say something about Dalton's precocity, it might say something about the state of that school, it might say nothing at all.We know from his diary that around this time he was reading Newton's Principia - still in the original Latin - and other similarly challenging works.At 15 he continued as headmaster while finding work in the nearby town of Kendal; a decade later he moved to Manchester, where he barely moved for the last fifty years of his life.In Manchester he became an intellectual whirlwind, publishing books and writing papers on subjects ranging from meteorology to grammar.He suffered from color blindness, which for a long time was called Dalton's disease because of his research.But it was a massive book called A New System of Chemical Philosophy, published in 1808, that finally made him famous.

In one short chapter of just four pages (the book has more than 900 pages), academics have their first encounter with the near-modern concept of the atom.Dalton's insight is simple: At the base of all matter are extremely tiny and irreducible particles. "Creating or destroying a hydrogen particle may be as impossible as introducing a new planet into the solar system or destroying an existing one," he wrote. Neither the concept of an atom nor the word "atom" itself is new.Both were invented by the ancient Greeks.Dalton's contribution was that he took into account the relative sizes and properties of these atoms, and how they were combined.

For example, he knew that hydrogen was the lightest element, so he gave an atomic weight of 1.He also believed that water was composed of seven parts oxygen and one part hydrogen, so he gave oxygen an atomic weight of 7.In this way he was able to derive the relative weights of known elements.He wasn't always quite accurate—oxygen's atomic weight is actually 16, not 7, but the principle makes perfect sense and forms the basis of all of modern chemistry, as well as many other sciences. The achievement made Dalton famous - even if in a sort of English Quaker understatement. In 1826, French chemist PJ Pelletier came to Manchester to meet the atomic hero.Peltier thought he belonged to some great institution, and was therefore taken aback when he discovered that Dalton was teaching elementary arithmetic to children at an elementary school down the lane.

According to the historian of science EJ Homeyard, Peltier was overwhelmed at the sight of the great man and stammered, "Excuse me, is this Mr. Dalton?" because he could not believe his own. Eyes, this famous European chemist is actually teaching children addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. "Yes," said the Quaker dryly, "sit down, please, and let me teach the boy this arithmetic first." Although Dalton wanted to stay away from all honors, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society against his will, and received a pile of medals and a handsome government pension.When he died in 1844, 40,000 people came out to see his coffin, and the funeral procession was more than 3 kilometers long.His entry in the Dictionary of British Names is one of the longest, matched in length only by Darwin and Lyell among nineteenth-century scientists.

A century after Dalton made his insight, it remained strictly a hypothesis.Some eminent scientists—notably the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, after whom the unit for the speed of sound is named—did not even know that atoms existed. "Atoms are invisible and intangible...they are figments of the mind," he wrote. Especially in the German-speaking world, the existence of atoms is viewed with such suspicion.This is also said to be one of the reasons that led to the suicide of the great theoretical physicist and ardent supporter of the atom, Ludwig Boltzmann. It was Einstein who provided the first indisputable evidence for the existence of atoms in 1905 with his paper on Brownian motion, but received little attention.In any case, Einstein soon got busy working on general relativity.So the first real hero of the atomic age was Ernest Rutherford, if he wasn't the first to emerge.

Rutherford was born in New Zealand's "outback" in 1871.In the words of Stephen Weinberg, his parents emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand in order to grow a little flax and raise a lot of children.He grew up in a remote part of a distant country, equally remote from the mainstream of science.However, in 1895 he was awarded a scholarship to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.This is fast becoming the hottest place in the world to do physics. Physicists especially look down on scientists in other fields.When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli's wife left him to marry a chemist, he was astonished beyond belief. "If she married a bullfighter, I'd understand," he said to a friend in astonishment, "but a chemist..." Rutherford could understand the feeling. "Science is either physics or stamp collecting," he said once.This sentence was quoted repeatedly later.But, in a certain irony, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, not Physics, in 1908. Rutherford was a very lucky man -- lucky to be a genius; but even more fortunate to live (not to mention his own emotions) in a time when physics and chemistry were so exciting and so at odds.The two disciplines will never again overlap as they once did. For all his accomplishments, he wasn't a particularly bright guy, and was actually pretty bad at math.During lectures, he often messed up his equations and had to stop halfway to let the students figure out the results themselves.Nor was he particularly good at experiments, according to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron.He just has a bit of tenacity and is more open-minded.He replaced cleverness with shrewdness and a little guts.His mind, in the words of one biographer, seemed to him to be "always out of bounds, much farther than most."When confronted with a problem, he was willing to work harder, spend more time than most, and was more open to unorthodox explanations.His greatest breakthroughs came because he was willing to sit in front of a fluorescent screen and spend many extremely tedious hours counting the flashes of so-called alpha particles—a task that was usually assigned to others.He was one of the first - probably the first - to discover that the energy inherent in the atom, when harnessed, could be used to make bombs powerful enough to "make this old world disappear in smoke." Physically, he was huge and solidly built, with a voice that could startle the faint of heart.Once, a colleague learned that Rutherford was going to deliver a radio speech to the other side of the Atlantic, so he asked coldly: "Why use the radio?" He was still very confident and in a good mood.When someone said to him that he always seemed to live on the top of the waves, he replied: "Well, I made the waves after all, didn't I?" CP Snow recalled that he once was in a tailor in Cambridge. Rutherford was overheard in the store saying: "My waistline is getting bigger day by day, and at the same time, my knowledge is increasing day by day." However, in 1895 he left Cavendish Laboratory1.In the distant future, his girth will grow bigger and his fame bigger.The year Rutherford arrived at Cambridge, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays at the University of Würzburg in Germany; the following year Henri Becquerel discovered the phenomenon of radiation.Cavendish Laboratory itself is about to embark on a long road to glory. JJ Thompson and his colleagues would have discovered the electron there in 1897; CTR Wilson would have built the first particle detector there in 1911 (we'll get to that); and James Chadwick would be there in 1932 Discovery of the neutron.In the further future, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick would discover the structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory. At the beginning, Rutherford studied radio waves and achieved a little success-he managed to send a crisp signal to a distance of 1 km, which was quite an achievement at the time-but he gave up because a Senior colleagues advised him that radio did not have much future.In general, Rutherford's career at Cavendish Laboratory was not prosperous.He stayed there for three years, feeling that he wasn't doing much, accepted a position at Montreal's McGill University, and has been steadily on the long road to greatness ever since.By the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had transferred to the University of Manchester.It was there, in fact, that he would achieve the most important results, determining the structure and properties of atoms. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was known that an atom was made up of several parts - Thomson's discovery of the electron established this view - but what was not known was: how many parts there are; how are they? put together; what shape they are.Some physicists think that atoms might be cubes, because cubes fit neatly on top of each other without wasting any space.However, the more common view is that an atom is more like a piece of raisin bread, or like a raisin pudding: a very dense solid, positively charged, strewn with negatively charged electrons, like the atoms on a raisin bread. raisin. In 1910, Rutherford (with the assistance of his student Hans Geiger, who would later invent the radiation detector that bears his name) fired ionized helium atoms, or alpha particles, at a piece of gold foil.To Rutherford's surprise, some of the particles bounced back.He said it was like he fired a 38cm shell at a piece of paper and it bounced off his lap.This is not supposed to happen.After thinking hard, he felt that there was only one explanation: the particles that bounced back hit something small and dense in the atom, while other particles passed through unimpeded.Rutherford realized that the interior of an atom is mostly empty space, with only a very dense nucleus in the middle.This is a very satisfying discovery.But the problem immediately arises that, according to all the laws of conventional physics, atoms should therefore not exist. Let's pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now.Each atom is made up of three fundamental particles: positively charged protons, negatively charged electrons, and uncharged neutrons.Protons and neutrons are packed inside the nucleus, while electrons orbit around the outside.The number of protons determines the chemical properties of an atom.An atom with one proton is a hydrogen atom; an atom with two protons is a helium atom; an atom with three protons is a lithium atom; and so on.You get a new element for every proton you add. (Since the number of protons in an atom is always in balance with the same number of electrons, you will sometimes find books that define an element by the number of electrons, with exactly the same result. Someone explained it to me this way: Protons Determining an atom's identity, electrons determine an atom's disposition.) Neutrons do not affect the atom's identity, but add to its mass.Generally, the number of neutrons is roughly equal to the number of protons, but it can be slightly more or less.Add or subtract a neutron or two and you have isotopes.Isotopes are used in archeology to determine dates -- for example, carbon-14 is a carbon atom made up of 6 protons and 8 neutrons (because the sum of the two is 14). Neutrons and protons occupy the nucleus.The nucleus is so small -- only a quadrillionth of the full capacity of the atom -- but so dense that it makes up virtually all of the atom's matter.If you expand the atom to the size of a church, the nucleus is only about the size of a fly -- but the fly is thousands of times heavier than the church, Cropper said. It was this spaciousness that Rutherford was wrestling with in 1910—this surprising, unexpected spaciousness. The notion that atoms are mostly empty space and that the solidity around us is an illusion is still astonishing.If two objects collide in the real world—we often use billiard balls as an example—they don't actually hit each other. "Rather," explains Timothy Ferriss, "the negatively charged fields of the two spheres repel each other... Had they not been charged, they would have passed each other unharmed like galaxies "You are sitting on a chair, not actually sitting on it, but floating on it at a height of 1 angstrom (100,000,000th of a centimeter), your electron and its electron irreconcilably repel each other, and it is impossible to achieve a more degree of closeness. Almost everyone has a picture of the atom in their head, with one or two electrons whizzing around the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun.This image was created in 1904 by a Japanese physicist named Hantaro Nagaoka, and is entirely a clever figment of the imagination.It's completely wrong, but it's alive and well.As Isaac Asimov likes to point out, it has inspired generations of science fiction writers to create stories of worlds within worlds, where the atom became the inhabited solar system, and our solar system became a much larger A particle in the system.Even CERN uses Nagaoka's proposed image as a logo on its website.Physicists soon realized that, in reality, electrons were not at all like orbiting planets, but more like the spinning blades of an electric fan trying to fill every space in their orbit at once. (But there is an important difference, and that is that while the fan blades only seem to be everywhere at the same time, the electrons are really everywhere at the same time.) Needless to say, in 1910, or for many years afterward, very few people had such knowledge.Rutherford's discovery immediately raised several big questions.In particular, electrons orbiting the nucleus can crash.Conventional electrodynamic theory holds that the whirling electrons quickly run out of energy -- just for an instant -- before spiraling into the nucleus, with catastrophic consequences for both.There is also the question of how the positively charged protons can stay together in the nucleus without blowing themselves and the rest of the atom to pieces.It is obvious that what is going on in that small world is not governed by the laws that apply to our larger world. As physicists delved deeper into this subatomic world, they realized that it was not only unlike anything we were familiar with, it was also unlike anything imaginable. "Because the behavior of atoms is so different from ordinary experience," Richard Feynman once said, "you are very difficult to get used to. In the eyes of everyone, both novice and experienced physicists, It seemed weird and mysterious." By the time Feynman made this comment, physicists had had half a century to get used to the atom's odd behavior.So you can imagine how Rutherford and his colleagues felt in the early 20th century.It was completely new at the time. Among those who worked with Rutherford was an affable young Danish man named Niels Bohr. In 1913, while thinking about the structure of the atom, he suddenly had an exciting idea.He postponed his honeymoon and wrote an epoch-making paper. Physicists can't see something as small as an atom, and they have to try to determine its structure based on how it behaves under exotic conditions, like firing alpha particles at gold foil like Rutherford did.It is not surprising that the results of such experiments are sometimes puzzling.A long-standing problem has to do with the spectral readout of the wavelength of hydrogen.The resulting shapes show that the hydrogen atoms release energy at some wavelengths and not at others.It's like a person under surveillance, who keeps appearing in a specific place, but how he runs back and forth can never be seen.No one can tell why. Just when he was thinking about this question, Bohr suddenly thought of an answer and quickly wrote his famous paper.The title of the thesis is "On the Structure of Atoms and Molecules", and it is believed that electrons can only stay in certain well-defined orbits and will not fall into the nucleus.According to this new theory, electrons traveling between two orbitals would disappear in one and immediately appear in the other without passing through the space in between.This insight - known as the "quantum leap" - is of course extremely peculiar, but too good to be believed.Not only did it show that electrons don't spiral disastrously into the nucleus, but it also explained hydrogen's puzzling wavelength.Electrons only appear in certain orbitals because they only exist in certain orbitals.It was a remarkable insight, for which Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922—the year after Einstein won it. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Rutherford had returned to Cambridge University to succeed JJ Thomson as director of the Cavendish Laboratory.He devised a model of why atomic nuclei would not explode.He thought that the positive charge of the proton must have been neutralized by some neutralizing particle, which he called the neutron.The idea is simple and touching, but not easy to prove.Rutherford's colleague James Chadwick searched for the neutron for 11 years, finally succeeding in 1932. In 1935, he also won the Nobel Prize in Physics.As Bourse and colleagues point out in their History of Physics, the late discovery of the neutron was probably a good thing, since neutrons were necessary to develop the atomic bomb. (Because neutrons have no electrical charge, they are not repelled by the electric field at the center of the atom, and so can be shot into the nucleus like small torpedoes, starting a destructive process called fission.) If they could be separated by the 2020s, they argue Neutron, "the atomic bomb was probably first developed in Europe, no doubt by the Germans". In fact, Europeans were too busy trying to make sense of the weird behavior of electrons.The main problem they faced was that electrons behaved sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves.This incredible duality has nearly cornered physicists.For the next decade, physicists all over Europe pondered, scribbled, and made contradictory hypotheses.In France, Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie, a ducal family, discovered that certain anomalies in the behavior of electrons disappear if they are viewed as waves.This discovery caught the attention of the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger.He did some clever refinements and devised an easy-to-understand theory called wave mechanics.Around the same time, German physicist Werner Heisenberg proposed a rival theory called matrix mechanics.That theory involved complex mathematics that virtually no one, including Heisenberg himself, understood ("I don't even know what a matrix is," Heisenberg once said in despair to a friend) , but it does seem to solve some unexplained problems in Schrödinger's wave mechanics. As a result, physics has two theories, based on conflicting premises, but leading to the same result.It's an unbelievable situation. In 1926, Heisenberg finally came up with an excellent compromise and proposed a new theory that came to be known as quantum mechanics.The core of the theory is "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle".It holds that the electron is a particle, but one that can be described by waves.The "uncertainty principle" that underpins the theory holds that we can know the path an electron takes through space, and we can know where an electron is at a given moment, but we can't know both.Any effort to measure one of them is bound to interfere with the other.This is not a simple problem requiring more sophisticated instruments; it is an unalterable property of the universe. What that really means is that you can never predict where an electron will be at any given moment.You can only think that it has the potential to be there.In a sense, as Dennis Overby said, the electron cannot be said to exist until it has been observed.In a slightly different way, you have to think that electrons are "everywhere and nowhere" until they are observed. If you feel confused by this statement, take comfort in knowing that it also confuses physicists."Once, Bohr said that if someone doesn't get angry when they first hear about quantum theory, it means they don't get it," says Overby. When someone asked Heisenberg if he could imagine an atom, he said He replied, "Don't do that." So it turns out that atoms aren't exactly what most people make them out to be.The electrons are not whirling around the atomic nucleus like planets orbiting the sun, but more like a cloud with no fixed shape.The "shell" of an atom is not some kind of hard and smooth skin, as so many illustrations sometimes tempt us to imagine, but just the outermost layer of this fuzzy cloud of electrons.In essence, the cloud itself is just a region of statistical probability, meaning that electrons cross it only in rare cases.So, if you figure it out, an atom is more like a fluffy tennis ball than a metal ball with a hard rim. (Actually, neither looks much like, in other words, anything you've ever seen. After all, the world we're talking about here is very different from the world around us.) There seems to be an endless stream of weird things happening.For the first time, scientists have encountered, as James Trefil puts it, "a part of the universe that our brains don't understand."Or as Feynman put it: "Small things don't behave like big things at all." As they delved deeper, physicists realized they had discovered a world in which electrons could move from a Orbits jump from orbit to orbit without passing through any space in between; matter suddenly comes from nothing—"but," in the words of MIT Alan Lightman, "from nothing to nothing." " There are many incredible things about quantum theory, the most notable of which is Wolfgang Pauli's 1925 "exclusion principle": that certain subatomic particles that come in pairs, Even if separated by a large distance, one party will "know" the other party's situation immediately.Particles have a characteristic called spin. According to quantum theory, once you determine the spin of a particle, that sister particle will immediately start spinning in the opposite direction and at the same speed, no matter how far away it is. In the words of science writer Lawrence Joseph, it's as if you had two identical billiard balls, one in Ohio, USA and one in Fiji, and when you spun one, the other immediately spun in the opposite direction, and the speed exactly the same.Amazingly, this phenomenon was confirmed in 1997. Physicists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland sent two photons in opposite directions to a location 11 kilometers apart. The results showed that as long as one of them is disturbed, the other responds immediately . It got to the point where Bohr, speaking of a new theory at a conference, said that the question was not whether it was absurd, but whether it was absurd enough.To illustrate the unintuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrödinger proposed a famous thought experiment: Suppose a cat is placed in a box, along with an atom of a radioactive substance, and a vial of hydrocyanic acid attached.If the particle decays within an hour, it activates a mechanism that breaks the bottle and poisons the cat.Otherwise, the cat would live.However, we have no way of knowing which would be the case, so from a scientific point of view there is no choice but to simultaneously assume that the cat is 100% alive and 100% dead.This means, as Stephen Hawking put it with some understandable emotion, that you can't "know with certainty what will happen in the future if you can't even determine with certainty the present state of the universe". With so many oddities, many physicists dislike quantum theory, or at least some aspects of it, especially Einstein.This is ironic, because it was he who, in the miraculous year of 1905, explained so convincingly that photons can sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves—a keystone of the new physics. core insight. "Quantum theory is very important," he thought politely, but he didn't like it. "God doesn't play dice. "He said. Einstein couldn't bear the idea that God created a universe with things in it that could never be known.Moreover, the insight about action at a distance -- that one particle can instantly influence another particle trillions of kilometers away -- completely violates special relativity.Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and here physicists insist that at the subatomic level, information somehow does. (By the way, no one has yet explained how particles do this. According to physicist Yakir Aharanov, scientists treat this problem by "leaving it out.") The biggest problem is that quantum physics disrupts physics in a way that didn't exist before.Suddenly, you need to have two sets of laws to explain how the universe behaves -- quantum theory to explain the small world, and relativity to explain the larger universe out there.The gravitational force of relativity brilliantly explains why planets orbit the sun and why galaxies tend to clump together, while proving not to work at the particle level.To explain what holds the atoms together, you need other forces. Two types were discovered in the 1930s: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.The strong nuclear force holds atoms together by holding protons in their nuclei; the weak nuclear force does a variety of jobs, mostly concerned with controlling the rate of certain types of radioactive decay. The weak nuclear force, despite being called the weak nuclear force, is a billion billion times stronger than gravity; the strong nuclear force is even stronger than that—much stronger, in fact—but its effects travel only over tiny distances.The influence of the strong nuclear force can only be transmitted to about one hundred thousandth of the diameter of an atom.This is why nuclei are so small and dense, and why elements with large and numerous nuclei tend to be very unstable: the strong nuclear force can't grab all the protons. As a result, physics ended up with two sets of laws—one for the small world and one for the larger universe—living their own lives.Einstein didn't like this situation either.For the rest of his life, he devoted himself to the search for a "grand unified theory" To tie these loose ends, but always in failure.He sometimes thinks he's found it, but it always ends up feeling like a waste of time.As time went by, he became less and less valued, even a little pitied.Again Snow wrote: "His colleagues thought, and still think, that he wasted the rest of his life." Elsewhere, however, substantial progress is being made.By the 1940s, scientists had reached the point where they understood the atom on an extremely deep level—and in August 1945, they provided the strongest evidence yet: two atomic bombs exploded over Japan. By that time, scientists had every reason to think that they were on the verge of conquering the atom.In fact, everything involved in particle physics is about to get a lot more complicated.Before we go on with this somewhat all-encompassing tale, however, we should take another part of history up to the present and consider an important and instructive tale of greed, deceit, pseudoscience, a couple of Necessary death events and the story of the eventual determination of the age of the Earth.