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Did you know...

...Ulsterman William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) made the first scientific calculation of the age of the earth in 1846?

This challenged the biblical fundamentalists who claimed that it began 6,000 years ago. Biologist Charles Darwin claimed that the earth was almost infinitely old, however Thomson calculated its age to be 100 million years. This was based on the rate of cooling of the earth (assuming that at one time it had the same temperature as the sun). Before dying, the discovery of radioactive elements in the earth's crust led to our modern estimate of over 4,000 million years!

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