Review: "The Man Who Found Time"

I've mostly been reading for research lately, so I'm not doing that well with finishing any books. This explains the recent radio silence here.

However, I have just finished reading a book that I picked up for research purposes but then found so fascinating that I read it through. It is The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity (Basic Books, 2003; 247 pages), by Jack Repcheck.

In one way, the title says it all. This is the story of how James Hutton, considered to be the "father of modern geology", figured out that the Earth isn't really 6,000 years old, which was the conventional wisdom among Western scholars when he was working in eghteenth century Scotland. While Hutton himself never ventured an estimate of the age of the Earth, his work opened the way for later scholars to figure the earth's actual age in years.

One of the interesting details of the book, in fact, was that the current estimate of 4.6 billion years as the Earth's age was not reached until 1956, the year I was born, really not all that long ago in the wider scheme of things.

But in other ways, the title of Repcheck's book falls far short of giving the reader a complete picture of what he or she will find in the book, since despite centering on Hutton and his theory of the Earth, there are plenty of other interesting subjects broached there. Repcheck gives us a tour of Edinburgh, where Hutton was born, attended university and did much of his work. But in addition, the reader is treated (and I mean that in the best way) to a brief explanation of the Highlander uprising of 1745 and 1746. The reader also gets an overview of the Scottish Enlightenment, during which an generation of Scotland's finest minds made huge strides in many areas of inquiry.

So, I arrived for the geology, as an important side note to my research into the history of anthropology and archaeology, and found a delightful sketch of a period of time that I knew very little about, in a place that often seems to get short shrift in conventional histories.

Currently reading...

This morning, I started reading Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution, by Richard Fortey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; 284 pages).

I love science, although I don't have the mathematical knowlege and ability to understand the hard sciences. I especially love geology, and even more especially love historical geology. And I adore trilobites, which lived a very long time ago, long before there were animals, or even plants, on land. So, how could I resist a whole book about them? Add to that the fact that I've already read one book by Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, and found that he can write like a scientist (which he is) and a poet all at the same time, and this book becomes a must-read for me.

Because I often read more than one book at a time, I'm also reading American Conspiracies, by Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010; 228 pages).

Yeah, I know. You're laughing. The thing is, I don't much believe in conspiracy theories (although I'll be happy to admit that I don't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; I just don't), but I'm fascinated by them.

Part of this fascination probably has to do with the fact that I was 7 years old when John Kennedy was assassinated and I pretty much grew up with all of the various theories surrounding his murder. Part of it is that conspiracy theories seem to be more a part of American culture now than they ever have been before, although they've been around a lot longer than most people might think. And part of my interest has to do with the fact that, along with religions, I'm interested in the anthropology, sociology, and psychology of belief systems in general, and conspiracy theories as a phenomenon fit right into that interest. I'm especially interested in what makes people buy into conspiracy theories, maybe because I'm not sure why I'm so adamant in my belief that Oswald was not a lone gunman.

At any rate, I'm not one of those people who only reads books that I know ahead of time that I'm going to agree with. Anyway, I've also got a book that debunks conspiracy theories waiting to be read, and I thought it would be interesting to read the two in tandem, or at least in very close proximity to one another.