Deep time
Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his book Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.[1]
The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by
Concept
million years ago) |
James Hutton based his view of deep time on a form of geochemistry that had developed in Scotland and Scandinavia from the 1750s onward.[6] As mathematician John Playfair, one of Hutton's friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, remarked upon seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James Hall in June 1788, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time".[7][8]
Early
Other scientists such as Georges Cuvier put forward ideas of past ages, and geologists such as Adam Sedgwick incorporated Werner's ideas into concepts of catastrophism; Sedgwick inspired his university student Charles Darwin to exclaim "What a capital hand is Sedgewick [sic] for drawing large cheques upon the Bank of Time!".[11] In a competing theory, Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833) developed Hutton's comprehension of endless deep time as a crucial scientific concept into uniformitarianism. As a young naturalist and geological theorist, Darwin studied the successive volumes of Lyell's book exhaustively during the Beagle survey voyage in the 1830s, before beginning to theorise about evolution.
Physicist Gregory Benford addresses the concept in Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1999), as does paleontologist and Nature editor Henry Gee in In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (2001)[12][13] Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987) also deals in large part with the evolution of the concept.
In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Gould cited one of the metaphors McPhee used in explaining the concept of deep time:
Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.[1]
Concepts similar to geologic time were recognized in the 11th century by the
H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley regarded the difficulties of coping with the concept of deep time as exaggerated:
"The use of different scales is simply a matter of practice," they said in The Science of Life (1929). "We very soon get used to maps, though they are constructed on scales down to a hundred-millionth of natural size ... to grasp geological time all that is needed is to stick tight to some magnitude which shall be the unit on the new and magnified scale—a million years is probably the most convenient—to grasp its meaning once and for all by an effort of imagination, and then to think of all passage of geological time in terms of this unit."[16]
See also
- Big History
- Chronology of the Universe
- Clock of the Long Now
- Deep history
- Formation of the Solar System
- History of Earth
- History of life
- Timeline of human evolution
- Long-term nuclear waste warning messages
- The World Without Us, a non-fiction book by Alan Weisman.
Notes and references
- ^ a b McPhee 1998, p. 77.
- ^ Palmer & Zen.
- ^ Kubicek 2008.
- ISBN 978-0-226-20393-5.
- ^ Braterman, Paul S. "How Science Figured Out the Age of Earth". Scientific American. Retrieved 2016-04-17.
- ^ Eddy, Matthew Daniel (2008). The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School 1750–1800. London: Ashgate Publishing. p. Ch. 5.
- ^ Playfair 1805.
- ISBN 0-374-10520-0.
- ^ Montgomery 2003.
- ^ Rance 1999.
- ^ Darwin 1831.
- ^ Korthof 2000.
- ^ Campbell 2001.
- ^ Toulmin & Goodfield 1965, p. 64.
- ^ Sivin 1995, pp. iii, 23–24.
- ^ H. G. Wells, Julian S. Huxley, and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life (New York: The Literary Guild, 1934; orig. publ. 1929), p. 326.
Sources
Web
- Campbell, Anthony (2001). "Book review: In Search of Deep Time". Archived from the original on 2007-01-02. Retrieved 2006-11-17.
- Darwin, C. R. (1831-07-09). "Darwin Correspondence Project – Letter 101 — Darwin, C. R. to Fox, W. D., (9 July 1831)". Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 26 March 2010.
- Korthof, Gert (2000). "A Revolution in Palaeontology: Review of Henry Gee's In Search of Deep Time".
- Montgomery, Keith (2003). "Siccar Point and Teaching the History of Geology" (PDF). University of Wisconsin. Retrieved 2008-03-26.
- Palmer, A. R.; Zen, E-an. Critical Issues Committee (ed.). "The Context of Humanity: Understanding Deep Time". Geological Society of America.
- Rance, Hugh (1999). "Hutton's unconformities" (PDF). Historical Geology: The Present is the Key to the Past. QCC Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-12-03. Retrieved 2008-10-20.
Books
- Ialenti, Vincent (2020). Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
- McPhee, John (1998). Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Repcheck, Jack (2003). "Chapters 2 and 5". The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity. ISBN 0-7382-0692-X.
- Rossi, Paolo (1984). The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, tr. by Lydia Cochrane, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 338, ISBN 0226728358.
- Sivin, Nathan (1995). Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections. Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Variorum series. pp. III, 23–24.
- Toulmin, Stephen; Goodfield, June (1965). The Ancestry of Science: The Discovery of Time. University of Chicago Press. p. 64.
- White, Andrew Dickson (1896). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. New York: D. Appleton & Company.
- ISBN 0-06-019361-1.
Journals
- Ialenti, Vincent (2014). "Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting The United States' High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project At Yucca Mountain". Science & Technology Studies. 27 (2). SSRN 2457896.
- Kubicek, Robert (2008-03-01). "Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time". ISBN 978-0-7653-1238-9.
- Playfair, John (1805). "Hutton's Unconformity". Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. V (III).
External links
- "The benefits of embracing 'deep time' in a year like 2020" (Vincent Ialenti) BBC Future.
- ChronoZoom is a timeline for Big History being developed for the International Big History Association by Microsoft Research and University of California, Berkeley
- Deep Time in Shockwave Playerinstallation.
- Deep Time – A History of the Earth: Interactive Infographic
- Deep Time Walk App – A new story of the living Earth: Interactive Walking Experience
- "Embracing 'Deep Time' Thinking" (Vincent Ialenti) NPR Cosmos & Culture.
- "Pondering 'Deep Time' Could Inspire New Ways to View Climate Change" (Vincent Ialenti) NPR Cosmos & Culture.