cosmos a spacetime odyssey the clean room

Name five things today with which we could draw parallels.

The ancient Romans well knew that lead was toxic and yet, they used it widely in things with which they came into daily contact.

Can you find another instance in which pure scientific research lead to the discovery of a hidden peril? Similarly, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina stumbled on a danger to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons while studying the atmosphere of Mars in the 1970s. Scientist and great citizen that he was, he would not rest until the danger was averted.

Clair Patterson went looking for the age of the Earth and encountered a great danger.

As he struggles, he attracts a nemesis, a man who exemplifies the misuse of science. No matter what it costs him he will not rest until he can avert it.

In the course of these Herculean efforts, Our story takes us across the centuries of searching until Patterson learns of a foolproofīut incredibly arduous way to calculate it. The violent youth of the Earth effectively erased all traces of its beginnings. 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. 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. 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.

Patterson, an All-American grad student in geochemistry from Iowa. Interwoven throughout the episode is the little known but heroic story of “Pat,” Clair It’s also a powerful example of solving a classic scientific problem.Ĭlick here for the full Episode 7 discussion Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.ĬOSMOS A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 7, “The Clean Room,” is an exploration of science at its best and worst – and an example of how one person can change the world for everyone’s benefit, without ever committing a single act of destruction or violence. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.

Cosmos a spacetime odyssey the clean room