Pioneers of Science

by Sir Oliver Lodge

The scouring action of the tidal currents themselves is not to be despised. It is the tidal ebb and flow which keeps open channel in the Mersey, for instance. But few places are so favourably situated as Liverpool in this respect, and the direct scouring action of the tides in general is not very great. Their geological import mainly consists in this—that they raise and lower the surface waves at regular intervals, so as to apply them to a considerable stretch of coast. The waves are a great planing machine attacking the land, and the tides raise and lower this planing machine, so that its denuding tooth is applied, now twenty feet vertically above mean level, now twenty feet below.

Making all allowance for the power of winds and waves, currents, tides, and watercourses, assisted by glacial ice and frost, it must be apparent how slowly the work of forming the rocks is being carried on. It goes on steadily, but so slowly that it is estimated to take 6000 years to wear away one foot of the American continent by all the denuding causes combined. To erode a stratum 5000 feet thick will require at this rate thirty million years.

The age of the earth is not at all accurately known, but there are many grounds for believing it not to be much older than some thirty million years. That is to say, not greatly more than this period of time has elapsed since it was in a molten condition. It may be as old as a hundred million years, but its age is believed by those most competent to judge to be more likely within this limit than beyond it. But if we ask what is the thickness of the rocks which in past times have been formed, and denuded, and re-formed, over and over again, we get an answer, not in feet, but in miles. The Laurentian and Huronian rocks of Canada constitute a stratum ten miles thick; and everywhere the rocks at the base of our stratified system are of the most stupendous volume and thickness.

It has always been a puzzle how known agents could have formed these mighty masses, and the only solution offered by geologists was, unlimited time. Given unlimited time, they could, of course, be formed, no matter how slowly the process went on. But inasmuch as the time allowable since the earth was cool enough for water to exist on it except as steam is not by any means unlimited, it becomes necessary to look for a far more powerful engine than any now existing; there must have been some denuding agent in those remote ages—ages far more distant from us than the Carboniferous period, far older than any forms of life, fossil or otherwise, ages among the oldest known to geology—a denuding agent must have then existed, far more powerful than any we now know.

Such an agent it has been the privilege of astronomy and physics, within the last ten years, to discover. To this discovery I now proceed to lead up.

Our fundamental standard of time is the period of the earth's rotation—the length of the day. The earth is our one standard clock: all time is expressed in terms of it, and if it began to go wrong, or if it did not go with perfect uniformity, it would seem a most difficult thing to discover its error, and a most puzzling piece of knowledge to utilize when found.

That it does not go much wrong is proved by the fact that we can calculate back to past astronomical events—ancient eclipses and the like—and we find that the record of their occurrence, as made by the old magi of Chaldæa, is in very close accordance with the result of calculation. One of these famous old eclipses was observed in Babylon about thirty-six centuries ago, and the Chaldæan astronomers have put on record the time of its occurrence. Modern astronomers have calculated back when it should have occurred, and the observed time agrees very closely with the actual, but not exactly. Why not exactly?

Partly because of the acceleration of the moon's mean motion, as explained in the lecture on Laplace ([p. 262]). The orbit of the earth was at that time getting rounder, and so, as a secondary result, the speed of the moon was slightly increasing. It is of the nature of a perturbation, and is therefore a periodic not a progressive or continuous change, and in a sufficiently long time it will be reversed. Still, for the last few thousand years the moon's motion has been, on the whole, accelerated (though there seems to be a very slight retarding force in action too).

Laplace thought that this fact accounted for the whole of the discrepancy; but recently, in 1853, Professor Adams re-examined the matter, and made a correction in the details of the theory which diminishes its effect by about one-half, leaving the other half to be accounted for in some other way. His calculations have been confirmed by Professor Cayley. This residual discrepancy, when every known cause has been allowed for, amounts to about one hour.