The Age of the Earth

That the world and the universe have an age is today a matter of evidence, and that this age amounts to many billions of years is also a certainty. More than two thousand five hundred years ago the philosophers of antiquity agreed, saying that the world could not be created from 'nothing'. But until the eighteenth century these theories, based on theology, which is the science of religion, limited us to the years written in 'Bereshit', and these years go no further than 5779 years…

With time the scholars of physics arrived at a result of some hundreds of millions of years, and today, with nuclear technique, one speaks of many billions of years. In 'Shir ha-Shirim' it is said that all that was, is, and there is nothing new under the sun. Day and night repeat, summer and winter repeat without tiring. Thus almost everything is a repetition. Philosophers like Democritus (460–370 BCE), Plato (428–347 BCE) and Aristotle (385–322 BCE) supported this point of view. The philosopher Aristotle was very sure that the world is eternal and said: 'The heavens are eternal, without beginning and without end, and contain time without end. Rivers are born and die, and the floods do not always go to the same places. Everything changes with time. The earth of yesterday is not the same as that of today.'

As is known, Alaska and Siberia formerly formed one and the same land, and the Bering Strait did not exist… The Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea were formerly each a different lake. It is when the straits of Çanakkale and the Bosphorus opened that the lands of Çanakkale and Gelibolu separated and were called the Anatolian side and the Rumeli side. That is to say, geography is changing with time.

These theories of Aristotle remained almost two thousand years as they were. These changes became more concrete when they saw that the earth had different layers due to volcanoes, and also the traces of fossils of fish in the mountains. When similar fossils were found in different places, geologists began to doubt that the years written in the holy books could correspond to the years of these fossils. Moreover, with Darwin's theory of evolution this doubt became more absolute.

George-Louis Leclerc, who lived in the years 1707–1788, for the first time pointed out that the world must have been part of the sun, and that it was torn off because of a comet. Leclerc calculated that 75,000 years passed until the earth became habitable. For the age of the world, he thought it must have more than ten million years. But in that era he did not have the courage to announce it, thinking that no one would believe him.

With Pierre and Marie Curie, who discovered radioactivity in 1905, Ernest Rutherford, basing himself on the disintegration of uranium, examined a uranium mine and noted that it was at least one hundred and forty million years old. After the Second World War the American Patterson thought of examining the meteorites that were formed at the same time as the world, and this opened the way to the answer of four billion five hundred and fifty million years. Thus scientists are working day and night to find a correct answer to the formation of the world. Adapted from the Encyclopaedia Universalis.