One Thing Leads to Another
My dad is hugely interested in physics. (He keeps telling me that he used to be interested, but not anymore. But that’s another story…). Unlike Rutherford who called other fields “stamp collecting”, my dad doesn’t have contempt for other fields. But I wonder whether even with his non-Rutherfordian worldview, my dad knew how totally unrelated fields drove physics even in the last century. Everyone can imagine how somewhat similar fields like chemistry could influence physics, but geology? Or paleontology (remember Ross from Friends ? The field of fossils and dinosaurs)? How could they possibly have pushed the boundaries of physics? But influence they did. It all started when people tried to compute the age of the earth a couple of centuries ago. As geologists started analyzing layers of rocks, they could not assign values to the ages of any of these layers since there was no known method to do so at that time. Then a renowned physicist got involved in the effort: Lord Kelvin...