Category Archives: science

43. A sense of time – Earth history and the London Marathon

Posted on 12 March, 2004 by | 6 comments

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In geology, you learn about time. About a lot of time.

As I look from my window upon the Surrey Downs, I see the Chalk and Greensand hills, walked by pilgrims heading east to Canterbury for eight hundred years and more. That seems a lot of time.

But to the Earth, it’s nothing. Our planet is around 4.6 billion years old, give or take a few. That IS a lot of time.

A new perspective is required, so let’s imagine the Earth’s own lifetime as a marathon course. The longest journey, but even in this unimaginable race, every 100 million years meant just one kilometre en route from Greenwich to The Mall.
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Posted in 2004, A1 - the best of roads of stone, environment, evolution, geology, science, the marathon journey

41. A Lincolnshire legend – Sir Isaac Newton

Posted on 27 February, 2004 by | 2 comments

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Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night
God said “Let Newton be!”
And all was light.
Alexander Pope

A hundred miles north of the capital, the A1 London – Edinburgh road crosses a forgotten and largely empty swathe of farmland. Forgotten because today it’s on the way to somewhere, but at the centre of nowhere. And empty because of what happened here more than six centuries ago. The Black Death arrived suddenly in Lincolnshire, in September 1348, but, within a few weeks, a third of the population was dead, and this once prosperous and populated piece of agricultural England lay devastated.
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Posted in 2004, A1 - the best of roads of stone, heroes, history, science, the marathon journey