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Cargando... Una nueva nistoria de la Terra : Un relato sobre la ciencia y Nicolas Steno, el genio que descubrió la Geologíapor Alan Cutler
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This is like a Dava Sobel book. Fascinating topic, middling writing. ( ) More than one man may lay claim to the title as the father of modern geology, and Nicholas Stano is one of the earliest. His work with fossils from the late 17th Century did not make a significant contribution to the understanding of the world around us during his time, but his work as later re-discovered was revolutionary. Anyone who read Simon Winchester's book "The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology" should like this book as much if not more. An interesting element of the book is the description of how influential the church was in the late 16th and 17th Century regarding scientific understanding, and how so many things we take for granted today were impossible to believe given the biblical interpretations so strong during those times. Acceptable as a popular history, but without any citations or even a full bibliography, and nowhere near a complete biography of the fascinating Nicolaus Steno (it focuses almost strictly on his geologic studies). A few examples of anecdotal mistakes crept in, too, so even though there isn't much out there on Steno, this may be skippable notwithstanding. Usually science books leave me cold; they are too abstruse and hard to read. This was a happy exception: the biography of the 'father of geology', his theories and how they were gradually accepted by the scientific community, and then by us laypeople. I can't imagine any other explanation than those Steno gave us, for basic geological principles. Very interesting story of how scientists in the 17th century had to reconcile their scientific findings against religious tenets and passages from the bible or risk even beheading. I found this complete edition a bit repetitious however perhaps because I knew what the scientific outcome was. I think I would have been happy with just the abridged edition.
One of Steno's great realizations was that shells found on mountain heights were not sports of nature but organic remains. He argued that they had not been formed in place, and that they were not being formed like that today. The shells were often eroded, but never distorted like tree roots that grow in hard soil. They were perfectly formed, not irregular like crystals. And in places where they were broken, the separated pieces fit together. These arguments were ingenious, the first coherent theory of fossilization; but they were not accepted during his lifetime. Steno's genius for anatomy provided him the tools to work on the mystery of fossils and the question of how seashells could be found in the rocks of mountains far from the sea. He hypothesized that layers upon layers of earth formed sediments in a sequence, recording a series of events and telling a story about the age of the earth. According to Steno, the stratum at the bottom is the oldest and that at the top is the youngest. Seashells, he said, found their way to mountaintops not by the great biblical flood, as many of his contemporaries believed, but by constant erosion and the sedimentation of soil. Steno published his discoveries in De Solido, after which he abandoned science, converted to Catholicism and spent the last 20 years of his life as an ascetic priest and eventually a bishop. Pertenece a las series editoriales
The story of enigmatic scientist-turned-priest, Nicholas Steno, who first proposed that the shell-shaped rocks commonly found on Italian mountaintops actually were fossils--a notion completely antithetical to the 17th century theological and scientific world view, which maintained that the earth was only 6000 years old. Placing Steno's story in the context of such characters as Darwin, Newton, Thomas Jefferson and Saint Augustine, Alan Cutler illuminates the subject of "deep time" by combining authoritative science with stories of extraordinary people to bring home the philosophical and personal significance of Steno's ideas, offering a fresh, new perspective on the very old planet on which we live. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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