Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure

¶ … Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything" by Doug Macdougall. Specifically it will contain a book report analyzing the book and its thesis. Author Macdougall is a former professor and scholar who studies age and time. In this book, he discusses radiocarbon and other forms of dating in this book, and illustrates how scientist attempt to come up with the age of all things in the universe.

Readers often hear about scientists dating items to thousands of years back in time, but few rarely think about how the scientists come about their findings. This interesting book clears that up, and makes the ability to date items much more amazing and understandable at the same time. He writes, "But a plethora of such methods now exists, capable of working out the timing of things that happened thousands or millions or even billions of years ago with a high degree of accuracy" (Macdougall 4).

It makes the reader wonder how they first discovered these methods, and how they know they are so accurate. They must have something to measure them against, and something for accuracy, and finding out their methods is at the heart of this book's thesis. The author really offers up a short history of radiocarbon dating - from what led to it to the people that helped discover and develop it.

All of this could be extremely tedious, but the author takes pains to promote the inventors as real people with great ideas, and he makes the topic much more interesting. One aspect of radiocarbon dating is that it can only be used on things that were once alive, it does not work on inanimate objects, like rocks, and this was very interesting and enlightening, as it had seemed it could be used on just about anything, up until reading this book.

Macdougall also clearly shows how the development of radiocarbon dating really changed the world of science, and it affected much more than just archaeology and geology. It affected many other sciences as well, and helped scientists and researchers come to conclusions about many different aspects of the Earth and the universe and its formation and continuing evolution. It helped lead to more accurate readings of inanimate objects like rocks, too, which helped scientists narrow down the age of the Earth and how it has evolved through time.

Macdougall uses many differing sources for his book, as his "notes and further reading" section indicates. He uses books, journal articles, essays, and scientific data, and offers some of that data up in Appendixes in the back of the book. It is quite clear he is an expert in his subject. What is more important, however, is that he has the ability to make what could have been a very dry and dull subject very readable.

He opens the book with the story of Oetzi, the Alpine Iceman, a fascinating look into the very heart of the book's thesis, and he grabs the reader's attention right away with this interesting story of a man who is probably at least 4,000 years old. He uses examples to draw the reader in before he gets too technical, and that makes this book much easier to read and enjoy.

He says he hopes to share some of the "excitement" (Macdougall 19) scientists in his field share when they discover new methods of.