Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio

balance between the biblical interpretation and the laws of physical science. Kant himself leaned decisively toward physics.He pointed out in 1754 the danger of relying on the human lifetime in estimating the age of the Earth. Kant wrote, “Man makes the greatest mistake when he tries to use the sequence of human generations that have passed in a particular [period of] timeas a measure for the age of the greatness of God’s works.”Referring to a sarcastic passage written by the French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1686, in which roses were metaphorically pondering the age of their gardener, Kant added a “citation” from the roses: “Our gardener, is a very old man; in rose memory he is just the same as he has always been; he doesn’t die or even change.”
    Around the same time that Kant was ruminating on the nature of existence, the French diplomat and geologistBenoît de Maillet carried out one of the first bold attempts to use actual observations and methodical scientific reasoning to determine the age of the Earth. De Maillet took advantage of his position as French general consul at various spots around the Mediterranean to make geological observations which convinced him that the Earth could not have been created fully formed in one instant of time. Rather, he inferred a long history of gradual geological processes. Being fully aware of the risks involved in challenging the dominance of the church’s orthodoxy, de Maillet composed his theory on the history of the Earth in a series of manuscripts that were collected, edited, and published under the title of Telliamed (“de Maillet” in reverse) only in 1748, ten years after de Maillet’s death. The work was written as a fictional string of conversations between an Indian philosopher (named Telliamed) and a French missionary. While de Maillet’s original ideas have been somewhat watered down by the tinkering of his editor, the Abbott Jean Baptiste le Mascrier, it is still possible to discern the basic argument. In modern terms, this was a theory of what is now known as sedimentation. Fossilized shells in sedimentary rocks near mountaintops led de Maillet to conclude that water entirely covered the young Earth. This hypothesis offered a potential solution to a question Leonardo da Vinci had already agonized over two centuries earlier:“Why the bones of great fishes and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snail are found on the high tops of mountains that border on the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?” De Maillet married his idea of a water-covered Earth with René Descartes’s theory of the solar system—in which the Sun resided in a vortex about which theplanets were swirling—to say that the Earth was losing its water into the vortex. Having observed in several ancient ports such as Acre, Alexandria, and Carthage a rate of decline of the sea level by about three inches per century, de Maillet was able to estimate an age for the Earth of about 2.4 billion years.
    Strictly speaking, de Maillet’s calculations and the theory on which they were based were flawed in a number of ways. First, water never entirely covered the Earth—de Maillet did not realize that rather than the water receding, the land might rise. Second, his understanding of rock formation was seriously lacking. He further weakened his case by occasional wanderings into fantasy. For instance, to support his contention that all life-forms emerged from the sea (an idea that is actually consistent with present thinking), de Maillet relied on accounts of mermaids and men with tails. Nevertheless, de Maillet’s estimate of the age of the Earth marked a major shift in the thinking about this problem. For the first time, it was not the human lifetime by which the age of the Earth was determined but rather the rate of natural processes.
    De Maillet humbly dedicated his book to the romantic French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac, who