Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time - Softcover

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Martin Gorst is a writer and director of science documentaries for, among others Britian’s Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel. He lives in England.

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The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin?
The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his "Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah's flood. Regrettably it was only the imprint of a large salamander.
And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take abillion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, "Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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tory of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin?

The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many b

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1

In the Beginning

sometimes the past is nearer than you think. The other day, out of curiosity, I opened my grandmother's Bible, and there, printed alongside the opening verse of Genesis, was the date for the beginning of the world--4004 b.c. This came as a surprise. Not because I didn't know about the date--I did. It was devised by an Irish bishop called James Ussher in the early seventeenth century. No, what surprised me was that anyone should still be proclaiming this as fact as recently as the twentieth century. My grandmother's Bible was printed in 1901. Surely everyone knew by then that the world was far older than this?

I first came across Bishop Ussher's date about fifteen years ago, in a couple of science books written in the 1920s but reprinted in the thirties as those popular paperbacks you can still pick up for a few dollars secondhand. When I went back recently and reread them, what struck me was how seriously they treated what I had regarded as a totally improbable date. Nobody in the twentieth century, I assumed, could really have believed that the world was created--as Ussher maintained--at 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 22, 4004 b.c. Yet the passion with which the authors of these books attacked the date gave the appearance of a controversy that, although no longer red-hot, was nevertheless still sizzling. H. G. Wells, writing in 1922, referred to the date as "this fantastically precise misconception," based upon "rather arbitrary theological assumptions." The English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, writing around the same time, was characteristically more strident: "we need not pay much attention to clergymen who protest their reverence for Scripture, and yet continue to use, or permit their flocks to use, bibles adorned with the conjectures of an Irish divine." There's no sign here of the mild amusement with which we view Ussher's date today. These words were the still-glowing embers of a once blazing debate--a debate that had been running since Ussher's dates first appeared in the Bible in the late seventeenth century, and that, in another form, still rages today. At its heart is an inquiry of great significance to both religion and science--the search for the beginning of time.

When did the universe begin? It is one of the simplest, yet one of the most fundamental questions humanity can ask. For the quest to measure the span of the world's existence is more than just an academic pursuit for an abstract figure; it is the point where science and belief merge or clash fatally. Once Ussher's date for the age of the world had been fixed in the pages of the Bible, and science had embarked on its relentless journey of inquiry, then, like a supertanker heading for a reef, collision was inevitable.

Like the famous debate over whether or not the Earth revolved around the sun, the search for the age of the universe was a search for truth. But in this case, the truth took longer to grasp. To begin with, the belief in a short-lived world was so deeply rooted that many of the earliest natural philosophers assumed their studies would confirm the biblical account--the truths of Scripture and the truths of nature, they believed, were one and the same. Only gradually did it become apparent that the world was far older than the Bible said it was. But even after they had accepted this, philosophers struggled to overcome their own preconceived ideas. As they pushed back the frontiers of time they became aware, with growing horror, of its awesome scale. The comforting spans of human experience were eclipsed by ages so enormous that the numbers themselves became inconceivable. Who could imagine a million years, let alone a billion? For some who peered into this abyss, the enormity of what they saw was too startling to reveal to the world; for others--those prepared to publish their results--the conclusions were often too astonishing for the world to comprehend.

As the search broadened from the close reality of the rocks beneath our feet to the distant arena of space above our heads, the evidence itself grew more remote, less graspable. A search that had begun with observations anyone could make relied, by the middle of the twentieth century, on observations of phenomena so small, or again so big, that they were invisible to the population as a whole. The closer science approached the "truth," the more remote and intangible it became.

When Wells and Haldane attacked Ussher's date in the 1920s, they knew that the universe was much older than the Bible said it was, but they were unable to put a figure on its age. In the last few years, however, science has taken a giant step toward solving this long-running mystery. New and more powerful telescopes, combined with the rapid processing power of modern computers, have enabled astronomers to make measurements that not so long ago they could only dream of. In 1998, for the first time, scientists obtained measurements of all the parameters required to find the universe's age. The search, it seems, may have reached its end.

The fact that there was a search at all, though, is due to Christianity. Two thousand years ago, the idea that the world might have a starting point was inconceivable. Almost all ancient civilizations believed that the universe had existed forever. From ancient Babylon to early India, the prevailing belief was in an eternal world. Nearly always this concept was combined with the idea of recurring cycles. Instead of having a beginning, time was thought to consist of endless eras, repeated over and over again for eternity. The idea probably grew from the repetitive motion of the heavenly bodies--the daily round of the sun, rising and setting; the monthly waxing and waning of the moon; the annual rotation of the constellations--which all recurred in an endless loop. By 1000 b.c., this idea of cyclic time had taken root in the Hindu faith, where the smallest cycle, the Maha Yuga, lasted 4,320,000 years. A thousand of these Maha Yugas made one Kalpa, and two Kalpas completed a single day in the life of Brahma, the chief Hindu deity. After this, the people were reincarnated and the cycle began again.

A similar view was held in ancient Greece. "Time is infinite and the universe eternal," proclaimed Aristotle in the fourth century b.c. Here, the length of cycle was determined by astronomy. Plato suggested that they lasted the period of time it took for all the planets to return to the same relative positions in their orbits that they had occupied at some earlier time. This span, estimated at 36,000 years, became known as the great year, or magnus annus, and later became popular in Rome. Here, among the many pagan faiths, astrologers promoted the idea of reincarnation, and the belief that the events of each cycle were repeated in the next. Because time in these cultures had no beginning, the idea of trying to find one simply didn't arise.

Throughout the ancient world there was just one civilization that didn't subscribe to this cyclic vision of eternity. Jewish scripture, with its story of the Creation, stated clearly that the world had a beginning, a first day when God created the heaven and the Earth. By the end of the first century a.d., Christianity had adopted this Jewish history as its own, and in the following centuries Christian missionaries spread the idea throughout the Roman world.

But the idea of everlasting cycles didn't die easily. At this time, the exact nature of the Creation as described in the Bible was unclear. Just because God had created the world, it didn't necessarily mean that this was the first time it had been created. In a culture dominated by a prevailing belief in an eternal universe, the story of the Creation could easily be viewed as just the beginning of a new cycle, another period of conflagration and rebirth. At the end of the fourth century...