NEW hardcover

Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time Baxter, Stephen

This book, then, is the story of how a farmers son from Scotland learned to peer into the deepest abysses of time It is a drama of personality, landscape and ideas, of an intellectual revolution that shaped our worldand of a man whose vision, rooted in antiquity yet tinged with modern philosophies, was not only ahead of his own time but speaks to our new centuryFrom the ForewordIn the eighteenth century, the received wisdom, following Bishop Usshers careful biblical calculations, was that the Earth was just six thousand years old James Hutton, a gentleman farmer with a passion for rocks, knew that could not be the case Looking at the formation of irregular strata in the layers of the Earth he boldly deduced that a much longer span of time would be required for the landscape he saw to have evolved In the lusty and turbulent world of Enlightenment Scotland, he set out to prove itHe could not have achieved this without the help of his friends Huttons entourage in Edinburgh would turn out to be the leading thinkers of the age, including Erasmus Darwin, Adam Smith, James Watt, David Hume, and Joseph Black But Hutton had his enemies, too His geological theories would ignite profound religious debate and was condemned as a wild and unnatural notion that would lead to skepticism, and at last to downright infidelity and atheismUltimately, however, his revelation was one of the most extraordinary and essential moments in scientific history Huttons discovery of deep time changed our view of humanitys place in the universe foreverLike Dava Sobels bestselling Longitude, Ages In Chaos vividly captures a transcendent moment in the history of human accomplishment