Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey

Episode 7 Summary

Interwoven throughout the episode is the little known but heroic story of “Pat,” Clair Patterson, an All-American grad-student in geochemistry from Iowa. In the late 1950s, his supervisor gave him what seemed at the time to be a simple scientific task:use a mass spectrometer to measure the presence of certain radioactive elements in a piece of rock to determine the age of the Earth. It turned out to be anything but simple. Patterson’s unwavering commitment to this challenge resulted in the discovery of the true age of the Earth – and one of the greatest public health dangers in history.

You can’t do justice to this man’s story without going all the way back to a time long before the Earth existed — to when the elements were formed in the hearts of stars. The violent youth of the Earth effectively erased all traces of its beginnings. How to ever know its true age?

Our story takes us across the centuries of searching until Patterson learns of a foolproof but incredibly arduous way to calculate it. In the course of these Herculean efforts, Patterson stumbles on a great danger. No matter what it costs him he will not rest until he can avert it. As he struggles, he attracts a nemesis, a man who exemplifies the misuse of science!