1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B TTOMTE and a Steady State Universe
Appendix C Musical Compositions
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Before the 1920's, guesses for the age of the Earth ranged from ten million to perhaps one hundred million years, and some people today believe the Earth is only six thousand years old. How did scientists find out what the age actually was? They tried to measure the temperature of the Earth deep down, learn how fast the Earth was cooling, and calculate the age from temperatures. But rocks in the Earth provide a much better way.
We've mentioned radium before which is imbedded in a rock called pitchblende. Scientists called the radium active, because it sent out invisible rays causing other material to glow. We used to have radium-dial watches which were popular specifically because they glowed in the dark. Radium, a natural element, is millions of times more active than uranium and sends out rays harmful to one's health. These rays are very much like the radiation coming from our popular nuclear weapons, which aren't so natural.
Radium can tell us how old the Earth is, so let's study some of this stuff. You have to be very careful when handling radium; cotton gloves won't do it. After a time, we will discover we have less radium than we started with, without doing anything to our sample. Some of the radium has changed into an element called radon all by itself which explains where the rays come from. When the radium changed into radon, our sample lost some weight. According to Relativity, losing weight creates energy, the rays, but what does losing weight have to do with the age of the Earth?
Radium changes (decays) into radon at a fixed rate. We measure this decay by what we call half-life, and one half of the radium changes into radon in sixteen hundred years. Different elements have different half-lives, anywhere from a fraction of a second to billions of years.
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