Aeons: The Search for the Beginning of Time - Tapa dura

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Martin Gorst is a writer and director of science documentaries on both sides of the Atlantic, including for the BBC and Channel 4.

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In the beginning was not the word but the date. But what date? When did the world begin? This question strikes at the root of mankind's understanding of the universe, or of the divine scheme of things. In 1650, Bishop James Ussher announced to no one's enormous surprise that the world began in 4004 bc. His date was so widely accepted that it was printed in the King James Bible, a close reading of which had allowed Ussher to make the calculation in the first place. But though his logic was impeccable, his numbers were wrong. Ussher was followed be a sometimes bizarre, always dogged stream of scientists and philosophers, each determined to salcutlate the moment when the world began. edward Lhuyd took his inspiration from the boulders of his native Wales to conclude that the world must be several thousand years older thean Ussher proposed; edward Hailey, the astonomer, suggested that the salinity of the sea might provide the clue to the age of the earth, meanwhile the Comte de Buffon attempted to replicate the cooling of the Earth's core by heating tiny iron balls and comapring their loss of heat. He reckoned the world was 10 million years old.

Darwin needed the world to be old enough to allow evolution, and by the beginning of the twentieth century scientists at last started to think in terms of billions of years. In 1998 two independent teams of astronomers probing the heavens with the Bubble space telescope found what they believe is the final piece in the jigsaw – the decisive evidence that reveals the age of the universe. With a margin error of over a billion years, their result may lack the reassuring precision of Ussher's exact moment of creation but in a final twist to the tale the discovery unveils a universe more startling than anyone imagined. Aeons is the story of science, religion and philosophy, as ever locked in a tense struggle to define and explain the human condition.