Astrophysical Classics: Measuring the Age of the Earth

Astrophysical Classics: Measuring the Age of the Earth

It took homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years on the planet to understand a fundamental, simple-sounding, question: how old is the Earth? The answer to this question has gone down in the history books as one of the most important geophysical and astrophysical discoveries of the past century. This paper, by Clair Patterson in 1956, is credited with providing the first accurate, measured age of the Earth.