Download The Seashell on the Mountaintop AudioBook Free
Dubbed "the founder of modern geology" by Stephen Jay Gould, the 17th-century Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno was the first man to discover "deep time": to suggest that the existence of fossils, particularly those a long way away from where in fact the animals of which they will be the remains would have lived ("the seashell on the mountaintop") demanded a a lot longer history for the planet earth than the roughly 6000 years suggested by the Bible. Steno's work was ignored for over a century: he himself dropped his geological studies without completing a university dissertation; he converted to Catholicism and later became a bishop; in 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul I. This work tells the storyplot of the passionate and fascinating man, exploring his contributions to geology and his remarkable ideas on science and religion. Steno's work was eventually to transform Western ideas of time, creating not only a long past for the earth, but also the probability of another that was not about to be cut short by Armageddon.
