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A Natural History of Time

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Preface...........................................................................ix1 Time without a Beginning?.......................................................12 On the Great Book of Moses......................................................243 Genesis as Viewed through the Prism of Natural Philosophy.......................544 Nature's Admirable Medals.......................................................855 The March of the Comets.........................................................1146 Heroic Age, Relative Time.......................................................1437 The Long History of Two Barons..................................................1768 The Elasticity of Time..........................................................2069 The Pandora's Box of Physics....................................................23710 The Sun, the Earth, Radioactivity—and Kelvin's Death.....................26411 The Long Quest of Arthur Holmes................................................28812 From the Atomic Bomb to the Age of the Earth...................................320Epilogue..........................................................................350Appendix: Mathematical Complements................................................355Source Notes......................................................................357Suggestions for Further Reading and Reference.....................................373Bibliography......................................................................409Index.............................................................................455

Chapter One

FROM MYTHS TO THE ETERNITY ASSUMED BY THE GREEKS The contrast between day and night and the alternations of the seasons naturally gave rise to cyclical conceptions of time. From Plato and Aristotle to Hipparchus and Ptolemy, these were the predominant opinions of Greek natural philosophers. Such conceptions also lent themselves to astronomical measurements of time, which had important implications for a universe that was assumed to be eternal.

The Origins of the World

Perhaps for its malleability, that humble clay we find sticking to our feet on moist pathways has always had a prodigious destiny within the realm of cosmogony. Has there ever been a divinity who did not make use of it for modeling some one or another of his various creatures? For example, Na'pi, the Old Man of the Blackfoot Indians, found suitable matter therein, as had Yahweh, for the making of a human. At the beginning, it was Na'pi who created the animals and the birds during the course of his numerous wanderings, and who provided for the placing here and there of the rivers, mountains, and prairies. After the world had been so arranged, he got the idea one fine morning to create a woman and her child. He outlined their forms in clay, waited several days, and finally commanded them to rise and walk. Obediently, the woman and the child followed him to the bank of a river. It was there that the Old Man presented himself, and the woman asked him, abruptly: "Will we always live?" The Old Man was surprised: "I have never thought of that," he admitted, "We will have to decide it. I will take this buffalo chip and throw it into the river. If it floats, when people die, in four days they will become alive again; they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them." He threw in the chip, and it floated. Gathering up a stone, the woman interjected, "No, I'll throw this stone in the river; if it floats, we will always live; if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other." The woman cast in the stone, and the stone sank. "There," announced the Old Man, "you have chosen. There will be an end to them." It was Woman, therefore, who was responsible for Death; but above all else, her desire had been to create a sense of compassion, a trait that the Blackfoot saw lying at the heart of the human condition.

In the fascinating diversity of their expression, the cosmogonical myths testify to this constant need that societies feel to explain life and death, to establish their own origins, to grasp those of the surrounding world, or to organize a pantheon of divinities that animate nature. Few indeed are the societies in which the spectacle created by the sky—the sole source of heat and light, extending as far as the eye can see, over the immense, fertile womb of the earth—has not led people to attribute the origin of all things to majestic, cosmic couplings, or even to the gods themselves. In this spirit, the Mesopotamians left magnificent accounts, collected by J. Bottéro, such as the following Sumerian lyric poem, nearly four thousand years old, which narrates how the first Tree and Reed were born from the coupling embrace of the Sky and the Earth:

    The immense platform of Earth glittered.
    Verdant green was its surface!
    Spacious Earth was dressed in silver and lazulite,
    Bedecked with diorite, chalcedony, carnelian, and antimony,
    Adorned with splendid verdure and pastures—
    Something of the supreme it had!
    What had happened was that august Earth, the holy Earth,
    Had made herself beautiful for Sky, the prestigious one!
    And Sky, this sublime god, drove his penis into
    Spacious Earth.
    He poured at one same time into her vagina,
    The seeds of healthy Trees and Reeds.
    And, entirely and completely, like an irreproachable cow,
    She found herself impregnated with the rich semen of Sky!

In a somewhat less crude passage of Genesis, written a good millennium later, Elohim was satisfied simply to order: "Let the Earth bring forth greenery, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, of every kind, each of them having its own seed in itself, on the Earth." But the relationship that can be recognized between these two texts attests to the permanence of the great questions proposed by myths, which may be different in their forms, and the permanence of the responses they elicit.

As time passed, it became apparent to the authors of antiquity that the cosmogonical accounts were strictly mythical. The Greek historian Diodorus the Sicilian (ca. 90 BC–ca. 30 BC) was conscious of this at the end of the first century BC when he described the origins of mankind in the first pages of his Historical Library. Either the earth had existed for all eternity and mankind had always inhabited it, he recognized, in summarizing the opinions of the philosophers and historians of the age, or mankind had made his appearance in a universe that had been created, one that would therefore have a limit to its existence. In the stories that dealt with this creation, every effort was made to relinquish the miraculous. To describe the origin of life, Diodorus related that, according to Democritus (fifth century BC), the sky and the earth had been separate at the time of formation of the universe because the air, which was lighter, had risen to the most elevated of regions, while all...