Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time
By Martin Gorst
Broadway Books/Random House
Measuring Eternity is a richly detailed, highly readable, well-produced account of five centuries of human progress toward answering a simple question: when did time begin?
It wasn't until the rise of Christianity that many people thought time even had a beginning. Earlier belief systems held that time was endless, or nearly so. But when the early Christians adopted the Hebrew chronology, they accepted its authority as the oldest record of creation. The clues in the Old Testament—notably the long line of generations since Adam—tempted the best thinkers to add up the years and fix the date it all began.
But from the start, the Bible was not enough. Its account had to be supplemented with other trustworthy information: first the chronologies of neighboring societies, then their records of eclipses and planetary observations. Thus the search for the beginning of time, from ancient days right up to the present, always included physical evidence.
Gorst decorates this timeline, like popcorn on a string, with dozens of different, evolving answers and the fascinating people who proposed them. We begin in 1650 with James Ussher's famous determination that God started time at 6 pm on October 22, 4004 BCE. Gorst succeeds not only in bringing the 17th century to life and placing us in its mindset, but in making Bishop Ussher's intellectual achievement a tangible and heroic thing. His work is such a monument of scholarship that it has scarcely changed to the present day.
What happened after Ussher was that the ground changed. On the one hand, it was learned that the Chinese had an indisputable record of events far longer than the Hebrew chronicle. On the other, scholars were learning about the Earth and its materials. Between geology and history, the Bible's stature slowly melted away. William Buckland's last-ditch fight to make the geological evidence fit the Bible left him a laughingstock in 1829, but generations before him Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in France and James Hutton in Scotland had raised the curtain on "deep time," never to fall again.
Gorst, who produces science documentaries for television, has an eye for telling details and color. Of Buckland we learn that he cooked mice; Buffon was a great enlister of young ladies for all purposes; and Hutton's bawdy letter from Bath gives the man, whose books were nearly indigestible, a rarely seen charm. Gorst also provides good notes at the end, in case you have an afternoon at the Bodleian Library to read old books and obscure journals.
The heart of Measuring Eternity concerns geology, and while this science gave us more than enough time to encompass evolution, it failed to show us when time began. In 1953 Claire Patterson finally showed that Earth was born four and a half billion years ago, but long before that the quest for time's birth had moved into the hands of the astronomers.
This part of the tale swiftly expands from a largely European setting to the whole globe. Gorst has interviewed the current leaders in astronomy and physics, giving them a welcome degree of presence. Happily, he brings us right up to the millennium for a fitting close, our current best estimate for the date of the cosmic Big Bang. It was made in 1999 by Charles Lineweaver, an aptly named American working in Australia. Just as with Bishop Ussher 350 years before him, Lineweaver's achievement is formidable—and certain to be overturned by some means not yet known.
