Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time

There is a charming second hand bookshop, not too far away, that boasts,'No book costs more than £3'. A visit to this Aladdin's Cave regularly unearths a missed gem.
I had never, to the best of my knowledge, heard of Martin Gorst or his book but, it looked interesting and, at £1, I would not be too disappointed were the initial impression to be proved erroneous: it wasn't. I was hooked, from the first few pages where I learned of Bishop Ussher's calculation of the date - and time!- for the start of the World. Should you be interested, it's 6pm on Saturday 22nd October 4004bc. If you want to know how the reverent gentleman came to this conclusion, then you'll have to read the book.
The book then leads one from this early attempt to the show more latest view upon the age of the Universe. One of the things that impresses me most about this tome, is that Mr Gorst does not ridicule the early attempts at dating this mortal coil, or become too enamoured of the latest efforts. He treats both with the respect, and scepticism, that they deserve, whilst making a novice in the field, such as myself, feel that they have some grasp of the concepts being discussed. I never felt patronized, or bamboozled by the science and, when dealing with a reader as pernickety as myself, that takes some doing.
This is one of those books which leads one to read the science section of the newspaper with renewed interest. show less

What an excellent read! Measuring Infinity traces the search for the time the Earth was created, a search that began as early as 400+ years AD, and ultimately the birth of the universe as well.

It covers the scientists we are all familiar with and those we have probably never heard of. It covers the exciting 'real' discoveries and the amusing 'mistakes'. It shows the great scientists, such as Newton and Einstein, making 'right' discoveries and their heartbreak when they were sometimes glaringly wrong.

The book shows the wide range of disciplines that were involved. The early naturalists - working to find answers through biology, fossils, geology and later the chemists and physicists.

The book is well written, telling you a tale of search, show more rather than being pages of data and formulas. It is a tale of people.

It's even fun. At the end of the 1600s, people were trying to explain how fossils were buried in so many layers of the earth, - if they had been deposited by the Flood. One explanation was that 'the water for the Flood came from an interior ocean hidden beneath the Earth's crust. In the normal state this was held in place by gravity, but at the time of the Flood, God had momentarily suspended the full force of gravity and the water had spilled out.' Later when God restored the gravity the fossils were sank by their density - therefore the heavier ones being lowest. show less

The book's title is a mess! The style these days is to have a title and a subtitle, the title is supposed to be short and catchy, and the subtitle is supposed to explain the title better. This book's title, "Measuring Eternity", seems like nonsense to me, and I can not explain why the author chose it. Every hypothesis I develop about the relation between the title and the book seems to fall quite short of being an adequate explanation. The subtitle, "The Search for the Beginning of Time", is also quite misleading, since the book's subject is not actually time, at all. A more appropriate title would have been "How Did We Find Out the Age of the Universe?".

Another flaw in the book, sadly common these days, is the illustrations. They are show more not particularly well chosen, there is no list of figures, just picture credits, and the diagrams are poorly drawn and labeled.

The subject, the narrative, and the selected quotations are rather good, though, and the science is pretty clearly explained. On the whole, I quite enjoyed this book, and I'm not sure that it is really fair to blame the author for the inadequacies of his publisher. It's actually quite a good book if you like science and its history, which I do. show less

History of finding the age of the world and universe. The second half is good, but too much space is wasted on prescientific imaginings -- if Gorst thinks I'm going to read scores of pages on Bishop Ussher and his ilk, ...