Author: Jack Repcheck
Publisher: Perseus Publishing
Genre: Science/History
Pages: 247
Retail Price: 9.99
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We all know the story of two individuals who called down the wrath of the Church upon their heads for daring to scientifically theorize on the nature of the universe. Galileo was tortured by the Inquisition and had to recant his theory that the planets moved around the sun, and Charles Darwin was so nervous, his theory on evolution wasn’t published until he was on his deathbed.
But between Galileo and Darwin there was another person who made a revolutionary discovery contrary to Church doctrine that completely changed how we think about the world. James Hutton, a Scottish farmer and forefather of modern geology, became the first person to guess the real age of the Earth as not being 6000 years, but millions.
This discovery was important for its time because no other scientist argued the years set out by the Bible. In fact, scientists shoehorned their observations to fit into the Bible’s timeline; even Isaac Newton wrote a biblical chronology. And in a way, it was more blasphemous than Galileo or Darwin: Galileo made the center of the universe the sun, not the Earth, and Darwin shed light on the nature of man, but Hutton’s research and claims invalidated the stories of Creation and Book of Revelations and completely changed our concept of man’s place in the history of the planet. Instead of man being created on the sixth day of the Earth’s being, our history is a drop in the bucket of the planet’s history. Hutton, correctly, deduced that in terms of man’s presence, the Earth practically has no beginning nor end.
James Hutton’s work set the stage for geologist Charles Lyell and the early fossilists, who would use and verify Hutton’s ideas, which eventually became accepted. Unfortunately, Hutton was soon forgotten in the annals of history, mainly because he only published one major work that was so academic and indecipherable that it went largely unread.
Jack Repcheck does a great job in returning credit to Hutton, and fleshing out his life and times given that there’s very little information on him. Either to offer background information, or more likely because there are so few facts about Hutton and he didn’t want a book full of speculation, the book digresses into many interesting directions. Repcheck gives an excellent and fascinating history of biblical chronology, and discusses in detail the Scottish Enlightenment of which Hutton was a part (along with David Hume, James Watt, Adam Smith, and Joseph Black). There is also an interesting account of Scottish history during this time and just preceding it, including the rebellion by Bonnie Prince Charlie, as well as an epilogue on how Hutton’s ideas influenced Lyell and Darwin.
Not counting the appendix, this is a short book of 200 pages, half of which directly discusses Hutton’s life, but Repcheck’s writing is so fluid and interesting that you won’t mind. Recommended.
Bottom Line: The heretic origin of Deep Time.
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