Deep Time
Gould ranks the development of the concept "deep time," which involved deliberately rejecting the biblical description of earth's past for nearly incomprehensible eons, with the revolutions associated with Copernicus and Darwin. To illustrate this, Gould picked three major figures in the history of geology, one traditional villain (Thomas Burnet) and two traditional heroes (James Hutton and Charles Lyell).
Read more about this topic: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
Famous quotes containing the words deep and/or time:
“The poor in bustling towns aren’t called upon, but the rich deep in the mountains have relatives visiting them from afar.”
—Chinese proverb.
“You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don’t know nothing about ‘em. He makes ‘em his own self and he’s glad when we come tell him they hurt. why, that’s a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, that’s a whole everything under the sun! Next thing you know he’ll be saying cats can’t have kittens.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)