Deep Time – How We Learned the Earth's Age

Podcast: Talking Science · Stavros kinnas

Opublikowano: 2026-10-15

Hold an ordinary rock in your hand, and you're holding something that, statistically, is probably older than every human civilisation combined, older than the dinosaurs, quite possibly older than complex life itself. Working out just how old the Earth actually is turned into one of the great detective stories of science, spanning theology, geology, physics, and finally atomic chemistry, and ending with a number, 4.54 billion years, that's almost impossible for a human brain to genuinely grasp. This episode traces that story from a seventeenth-century biblical calculation through Scottish cliffs, a brilliant physicist's confident but wrong answer, and finally to...