How Old Is the Universe?

UNIVERSE?

CHAPTER 1

Introduction 13.7 Billion Years

I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use. . . . He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and mind by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.

—Galileo Galilei, in Letter to Madame Christina (1615), translation by Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957)

Astronomers are at an enormous disadvantage, compared with other scientists. A biologist can bring a collection of fruit flies into his laboratory, encourage a particular behavior among those flies, and apply all the tools of his trade to studying that behavior. A chemist can mix chemicals together, heat them up or cool them down, and study how they react in the controlled environment of her laboratory. A geologist can hike up a mountain, collect rocks from a particular outcrop, and return these samples to his laboratory for analysis. A physicist can power up a laser and test the mechanical properties of a newly-created polymer and can do this on her vibration-isolated, experimental table. Astronomers? They cannot drag the stars into their laboratories. They cannot make stars hotter or cooler to see how they behave when their temperatures change. They cannot slice open galaxies in order to peer into their cores. Astronomers can only take what the universe offers—light and a few small rocks—and make the most of it.

For centuries, astronomers have measured the brightnesses, colors, and positions of objects in the nighttime sky, as one generation after another has sought to understand the nature and behavior of the remote objects shining in the heavens. Using basic principles of geometry, and the physics describing light, heat, and gravity, astronomers deduced that some of those glimmering objects in the sky are akin to our Sun: They are stars. They also discovered that stars have a wide range of sizes, masses, and temperatures, and that stars are born, live out their lives, and then die. Proving seemingly obvious things, however, like the fact that stars are distant (which prompted the thorny question, how distant?), was extremely difficult. To answer the question of how far away stars are—not to mention how hot, how massive, and how large or small they are—astronomers had to learn how to take detailed measurements of celestial objects that lie at great distances from our telescopes. Since the stars could not be brought to Earth to be weighed and measured, astronomers had first to develop the right tools for measuring stars. Then they were able to apply their knowledge of concepts like Doppler shifts, radioactivity, and nuclear fusion to the measured properties of stars, and answers to all sorts of previously unanswerable questions, including ones that had frustrated astronomers since antiquity, began to rain down from the heavens. This deluge of evidence led eventually to an astonishing and hard-won intellectual triumph on the grandest possible scale: the answer to one of the most fundamental questions ever to puzzle humanity, How old is the universe?

Astronomers have made great strides. Barely 200 years ago, they were unable to measure the distances to even the closest stars, let alone use the properties of stars to measure distances to galaxies 100 million light-years away. Now they boldly claim to know the age of our universe to an accuracy of better than 1 percent: 13.7 billion years. You now know the answer to the question on the cover of this book, and so it is clear that the book you are holding in your hands is not a mystery. But, it is about a mystery. How have 400 years of science brought us to this point at which astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists can claim that the universe came into existence at a specific moment, 13.7 billion years ago? And how much confidence should you have in this statement?

Ask any astronomer why she believes the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and she will tell you that she does not believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years; she knows that it is 13.7 billion years old—give or take a hundred million years. Why are astronomers so confident? It turns out that their certainty is not hubris. They know that this number is the only valid answer to the question of the age of the universe because it emerges from a meticulous interpretation of all the data—from rocks, stars, galaxies, the whole universe—that humanity has painstakingly gathered over the centuries. It is the only answer that is consistent with the laws of physics as we know them and with the firm logic of mathematics and justified by the collective labors of astronomers, as well as of chemists, mathematicians, geologists, and physicists. The answer rests, in fact, on very solid foundations.

But why exactly do twenty-first century astronomers think that 13.7 billion years is the right answer? Why not 20 billion years? Why not 6,000 or 50 million or 1,000 trillion years? How do astronomers know that the universe even has an age—that it is not eternal?

A thorough and persuasive answer to the question of the age of the universe requires that we follow in the footsteps of Galileo and of the many other curious scientists who have come before us, and that we explore the great breadth of knowledge that lies at the core of modern astronomy. The answer to our title question is derived from evidence gleaned from many areas of inquiry that fits together, much like foundation stones in the base of a solid wall. Science in general progresses when curious people pose smart questions and then answer them, or identify problems (the stones in a foundation that do not fit well and consequently make the wall unstable) and then solve them, thereby making the entire scientific structure sturdier and more reliable. The astronomers and other scientists who have made some of the greatest achievements leading to our discovery of the age of the universe will appear in these pages. Some of them may be utterly unfamiliar to most readers, while others bear names that have become iconic. They include William Herschel, Joseph Fraunhofer, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Edward Charles Pickering, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Ejnar Hertzsprung, Henry Norris Russell, Vesto Slipher, Harlow Shapley, Edwin Hubble, Fritz Zwicky, George Gamow, Walter Baade, Vera Rubin, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, Robert Dicke, and James Peebles.

These scientists, and many others, advanced our knowledge of the universe through their work, often correcting errors in our collective wisdom and enabling the entire field of astronomy to leap forward. In these pages, you will learn about these discoveries and their significance. By walking in the steps of the astronomers who ascertained the ages of certain objects in the universe and hence deduced the age of the universe itself, you will learn just how solid are the foundations of our astronomical knowledge. When you have finished this book, you will understand the central claims that strongly support the conclusion that the universe is just under 14 billion years old:

The oldest known meteorites in the solar system are 4.56 billion years old. From all of our knowledge about how stars, planets, and asteroids—the parent bodies of meteorites—form, astronomers are confident that the Sun and all the other objects in our solar system were born at nearly the same time as these meteorites. This age for the Sun is consistent with all observations and theorists’ understanding of the physics of the Sun, of other stars, and of the life cycle of stars. As the universe must be older than every object contained in it, including our solar system, the universe clearly must be at least 4.56 billion years old.

The oldest white-dwarf stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy have been cooling off (as white dwarfs) for about 12.7 billion years. Since the white dwarfs formed from stars that lived and then died, and since those stars that died had lifetimes of a few hundred million years, this age requires that the Milky Way, and certainly the universe, must be older than about 13 billion years.

The oldest globular clusters in the Milky Way have measured ages of about 13.4 billion years. Therefore, the Milky Way and the universe itself must be at least marginally older than these oldest globular clusters.

Cepheid variable stars in galaxies out to distances of 30 megaparsecs (100 million light-years) trace the expansion of the universe. They permit astronomers to calculate how long the universe has been expanding at the current rate in order for the galaxies to have achieved their current separation distances. Assuming that the expansion rate of the universe has been constant over the history of the universe, which all evidence suggests is very close to a correct assumption, the age of the universe is just a bit greater than 13.5 billion years.

Maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation contain information about the range of temperatures and the sizes of the structures in the universe when this radiation was emitted. When combined with information about dark matter and dark energy and the rate of expansion of the universe, the most thorough and rigorous analysis of the maps of the cosmic microwave background reveals that the age of the universe is close to 13.7 billion years.

These claims only make sense if one knows what white dwarfs, globular clusters, Cepheid variable stars, and the cosmic microwave background are. Our story, an intellectual voyage of discovery spanning centuries, will be interwoven with the science that elucidates the nature of these celestial objects and explains how astronomers have learned their ages, and how, in turn, they can claim to know the precise age of our universe. But, where to begin? As it turns out, the search to uncover the age of the universe started right here at home, with the mystery of the age of the Earth.

1

THE AGE OF OBJECTS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

CHAPTER 2

4004 BCE

In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth, Gen. I. V.I. Which beginning of time, according to our chronologie, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October in the year of the Julian calendar, 710.

—James Ussher, in The Annals of the World (1650–1654)

How old is the Earth? Clearly it cannot be older than the rest of the universe, so if we could determine the age of the Earth we would have a minimum age for the universe. And that would be an excellent starting point for investigating its total age.

We live on the Earth. By virtue of that location, we are able to learn more about the Earth than about other places in our solar system, let alone our universe. So let us begin attempting to measure the age of the Earth by observing the world around us. From this beginning, we can then use the tools of astronomy to look outward, taking measurements to determine the age of celestial objects and, eventually, of the entire universe. How exactly do we begin?

Aristotle’s Eternal Heaven

Without the tools of modern science, what process would a scholar follow in order to determine the age of the Earth?

For 2,000 years, Aristotle provided an answer to that question that satisfied most seekers. In his treatise On the Heavens, which he wrote in about 350 BCE, he declared there is one heaven only, and [that] it is ungenerated and eternal. The universe, then, has existed for all times past and will continue to exist into the infinitely remote future. The wheeling sphere of the stars, the one heaven, is eternal. Aristotle’s claim for a universe without beginning and without end rested on his ideas for physics and for motion: the celestial sphere moves in circular motion around the Earth, circular motion is the perfect motion (in contrast to up/down or sideways movements), objects moving in circles have achieved their ultimate purpose, their telos, and have neither the ability nor any reason whatsoever to slow down, speed up, or change direction. Objects cannot become perfect since they would have to change from imperfect to perfect, which is not possible, according to Aristotle; therefore, the heavens have always been perfect and must have existed in their current state for all of eternity. Aristotle then adds arguments to prove that the Earth, too, is eternal: a sphere cannot exist without a center, and the Earth is very clearly the center of the heavenly sphere; therefore, since the heavenly sphere is eternal, the Earth also must be eternal. Aristotle’s logic and reasoning were elegant, sophisticated, powerful, and regrettably also wrong. Nevertheless, despite obvious flaws in his metaphysical arguments, Aristotelian natural philosophy dominated human understanding of the physical universe until the seventeenth century.

The revolutionary ideas that finally overthrew Aristotle’s cosmology emerged with the publication of Nicholas Copernicus’ monumental work The Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs in 1543 and culminated with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687. During the century and a half between the appearances of these two great books, new astronomical ideas emerged from the work of, among others, Tycho Brahe, Michael Maestlin, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo (who built his first telescope in 1609). By the early seventeenth century, natural philosophers were beginning to seriously question Aristotelian cosmology. Perhaps the universe is not eternal. If the universe is not eternal, it had a beginning. If the universe had a beginning, the Earth also had a beginning. Almost overnight, the age of the Earth emerged as an important topic for scholarship. Copernican cosmology, however, unlike Aristotelian cosmology, offers no answers. The heavens, as understood by the Copernicans, are mute as to their age. What, then, is the age of the Earth? And through what methodology would seventeenth-century scholars have even begun to try to answer this question?

Biblical Chronology

In the seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher calculated the length of time that had lapsed since Adam appeared in the Garden of Eden. He reasoned as follows. The words of Chapter 1 of Genesis detail how Adam appeared on the sixth day after the beginning, after God created the heavens and the earth. Therefore, according to the logic used by Bishop Ussher, the period of time since God created man in his image plus five days provides an age for the Earth as well as, presumably, all of Creation. The remainder of the equation depended on a long-established tradition of biblical chronology.

As early as the second century of the Christian era, Rabbi Jose ben Halafta in his Seder Olam Rabbah (Book of the order of the world) listed the dates of biblical events, beginning in Year 0 when God made Adam. Rabbi Jose’s who begat whom when logic places the births of Seth in Anno mundi (the year of the world) 130, Enosh in AM 235, and Kenan in AM 325, and continues through to the births of Methuselah in AM 687, Lamech in AM 874, and Noah in AM1056. The Flood began in AM 1656, the Exodus from Egypt occurred in AM 2448, the Jewish people entered the land of Canaan after wandering in the wilderness of Sinai for forty years in AM 2488, and the First Temple was destroyed 850 years later, in AM 3338. The modern Jewish calendar continues to follow this logic: the calendar year that began at sundown on September 8, 2010 and continued into September of 2011 was the year AM 5771. Assuming God created Adam six literal days after creating the world, Rabbi Jose’s chronology places the Creation at approximately 3760 BCE.

One of the first Christian chronologists, Julius Africanus (c. 170–240 CE), who based his chronology on the Greek version of the Bible, placed the birth of Seth in Anno Adam 230, the Flood in AA 2262, the Exodus in AA 3707, and the birth of Christ in AA 5500. Assuming Christ was born in the time frame of approximately 6 to 2 BCE, the chronology of Africanus would place the date of Creation at approximately 5504 BCE.

The most famous early Christian chronology is the Chronicle of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine (d. 339 AD), which we know from Jerome’s Latin translation. Eusebius, like Africanus, places the Flood in AA 2262 but dates the Exodus to AA 3689 and the birth of Christ to AA 5199.

But let’s get back to our seventeenth-century chronologer James Ussher, who was incidentally the Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin. Ussher published his 1,000+-page Annals veteris testamenti, a prima Mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first beginning of time) in 1650–54. His datings agreed more closely with those of Rabbi Jose than with either Africanus’s or Eusebius’s, placing the Flood in AM 1656, the Exodus in AM 2513, and the destruction of the first Temple in AM 3416. In Ussher’s chronology, Christ was born in AM 4000. Since he accepted that the year of Christ’s birth was 4 BCE, the year for the Creation became 4004 BCE. Ussher was neither the first nor the last scholar to use this biblically-based method to determine the age of the Heaven and Earth, but he is certainly the best known, most scorned, and least accurately quoted of these scholars. Seen with twenty-first-century hindsight, his methods indeed have little scientific merit. Nonetheless his calculations, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould (1991), represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology . . . . This form of scholarship used all available historical records to place biblical events into a chronology that included extra-biblical events as well (e.g., the fall of Troy, the founding of Rome, the reigns of emperors and pharaohs, the historical dates of total eclipses of the Sun and Moon). Following the tradition of Jewish chronographers, Ussher placed the beginning of the year in the fall and the beginning of the day at sunset; following Christian tradition, he identified Sunday as the first full day of the first week; and following the most accurate astronomical charts of his day, the Rudolphine Tables of Johannes Kepler, he identified the first Sunday after the autumnal equinox in 4004 BCE as October 23. Therefore, according to Ussher’s calculations, the 4004 BCE first act of Creation occurred at sunset on the evening of Saturday, October 22, 4004 BCE. Ussher earned lasting fame when the 1703 edition of the King James Version of the Bible appeared with a marginal note identifying 4004 BCE as the date of Creation. That marginal note continued to appear in print in the King James Version well into the twentieth century.

The famous claim that Man was created at nine o’clock in the morning was made by the Reverend John Lightfoot, though it is usually attributed incorrectly to Bishop Ussher. Lightfoot, a contemporary of Ussher, was a distinguished biblical scholar who also became a university vice-chancellor, of Cambridge. In 1642, he published a twenty-page book titled A Few and New Observations upon the Book of Genesis. According to Lightfoot, Heaven and earth, center and circumference, were created together in the same instant; and clouds full of water . . .were created in the same instant with them. . . . Twelve hours did the heavens thus move in darkness; and then God commanded, and there appeared, light to this upper horizon. That is, for the first twelve hours after Creation, the world was shrouded by darkness. Then, God brought forth the light of day. Lightfoot continues, "Man was created by the Trinity about the third hour of the day, or nine of the clock in the morning." For Lightfoot, the moment of Creation was 6 PM on the evening of the autumnal equinox in 3929 BCE; after twelve hours of darkness and three more hours of light, Man was created at 9 AM the next morning.

Lightfoot’s and Ussher’s chronologies merged in 1896 in a popular and influential text, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, written by Andrew Dickson White, the cofounder and first president of Cornell University. In his text, White wrote, incorrectly, that Ussher calculated that man was created at nine o’clock in the morning on October 23, 4004 BCE.

Enter the Astronomers

In the early seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler, whose bona fides as the inventor of mathematical astrophysics via Kepler’s laws are unquestioned, proposed an astrophysical model for determining the age of the universe. According to Kepler, at the moment of Creation the Sun would have been at solar apogee (the moment during the Earth’s orbit when the Earth and Sun are furthest apart) and simultaneously at the head of the constellation Aries. Kepler understood that the direction of the solar apogee—that is the direction with respect to the background stars in the constellations of the zodiac in which an Earth observer sees the Sun when it reaches its apogee position—changes from year to year, though it does so very slowly. Using then-current values for the rate of movement of the solar apogee and the then-current position of the Sun, Kepler calculated backwards to the time when the solar apogee would have been at the head of the constellation Aries. His answer: God created the world in 3993 BCE at the summer solstice. Kepler’s contemporary, the Danish astronomer Christian Longomontanus, used the same logic to calculate the year of Creation as 3964 BCE.

Even Isaac Newton, who coinvented calculus and discovered the first quantitatively successful law of gravity, had his say on the matter. In his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms: Amended, published posthumously in 1728, Newton combined information from scripture, from Herodotus’ Histories, and from astronomy—he used his calculations of the precession rate of the equinoxes to determine that the Argonaut’s expedition took place in 936 BCE—to affix Creation at 3998 BCE.

It would appear, then, that by the early eighteenth century, a scholarly consensus had developed: Creation took place around 4000 BCE, give or take a few decades. Lightfoot (3929 BCE), Longomontanus (3964 BCE), Kepler (3993 BCE), Newton (3998 BCE), and Ussher (4004 BCE) used different scholarly methods and disagreed on some of the details and the exact year, but many theologians, astronomers, and physicists agreed that the Earth and the rest of Creation along with it were only two centuries shy of 6,000 years old. A convergence of opinion is not equivalent to correctness, however, and there were many other scholars, using evidence from other areas of learning, who disagreed with their assertion.

Table 2.1.

Dates for the Creation of the Universe Based on Biblical Chronology

CHAPTER 3

Moon Rocks and Meteorites

But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.

—James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1788)

During the seventeenth century, just when an apparent consensus was developing on the age of the Earth, the entire method of biblical chronology came into question. Since chronologists using the three different textual traditions of the Bible (the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Samaritan) obtained time spans since Adam that differed by nearly 2,000 years, the issue of which tradition was most accurate became important. Other scholars asked unanswerable questions that further called into question the method: Was Adam the first man or just the first biblical man? Was the Bible accurate in recording that Methuselah lived for 969 years? Scientists, including the astronomer Edmond Halley, asserted that Scripture did not reveal how long the Earth may have existed prior to the Creation described in Genesis. After all, scholars had been arguing for 2,000 years as to whether the days described in Genesis were figurative days or literal twenty-four hour days. Perhaps Scripture could reveal the temporal history of humankind on Earth, but it might not provide evidence about the history of the Earth itself, let alone of the entire universe. Furthermore, in a post-Aristotelian world, scientists and philosophers began to think about physical processes through which the world might have been created. Some of these processes, as posited, for example, in the vortex theory of René Descartes (presented in his posthumous publication of 1664, Le Monde, ou traité de la lumière [The world, or treatise on light]) and the nebular theory of Immanuel Kant (1755, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [Universal natural history and theory of the heavens]) and Pierre Simon Laplace (1796, Exposition du système du monde [The system of the world]), might have required tens of thousands of years or more.

Fossils

By 1800, Georges Cuvier had invented the science of paleontology and had identified twenty-three species of extinct animals in the fossil record. Fish fossils were found on mountain tops. Fossil mammoths were found in Siberia. Could all of this have happened in less than 6,000 years? Biblical literalists explained the existence of fossils by the theory of catastrophism, which identifies supernatural upheavals like Noah’s flood as the causes of cataclysmic changes to life (and rocks) on Earth. This explanation precludes any scientific estimate of the age of Earth and demands that we use biblical chronology to determine its age.

Some members of the emergent scientific community were convinced that uniformitarianism could explain the existence of fossils. This theory, first put forth by Scottish geologist James Hutton in 1795 and championed and made popular in 1830 by another Scottish geologist, Charles Lyell, held that geological and biological changes of the past were the results of the same processes that are at work today. This explanation would permit scientists to calculate the age of the Earth based on what they knew of physical, chemical, geological, and biological processes that they could directly observe. Despite finding no vestige of a beginning, Hutton’s geological theory posited an ancient Earth—for Hutton, time could no longer be measured in thousands or even millions of years—but not an eternal Earth. But neither Hutton nor Lyell nor any other geologist in the nineteenth century could venture to suggest a more specific span of years.

Radioactivity

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, scientists began to use concepts from physics to estimate the age of the Earth. For example, in Les époques de la nature (1778), Georges-Louis Leclerc, a French naturalist, calculated that if the Earth began as a molten sphere of iron, slowly cooled until it was solid, and then further cooled until it reached its present-day surface temperature, the age of the Earth would be at least 75,000 years and perhaps as great as 168,000 years.

The scientific breakthrough that provides our modern method for determining the age of the Earth came from the discovery of radioactivity by French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1896. Subsequently, the extensive studies of this phenomenon, including the discovery of the radioactive element radium in the late 1890s by two more French physicists, Marie and Pierre Curie, turned radioactivity into a tool that could function as a geologic clock, a use first suggested by the English physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1905.

Radioactivity is a term that covers several different processes by which atoms fall apart or rearrange their internal structures so as to change from one element to another. To understand radioactivity, we first need to know something about the internal structures of atoms. The universe consists of many elements, all of which are made up of some combination of positively-charged protons, charge-neutral neutrons, and negatively- charged electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom determines the element. For example, all carbon atoms have six protons in their nuclei. Since protons are positively-charged, a neutral carbon atom must also have six negatively-charged electrons in a cloud that surrounds the nucleus.

Like charges repel each other through the electromagnetic force. Consequently, protons inside a nucleus prefer to be far apart. Protons, however, also attract each other through the strong nuclear force. At the distances between protons in the nucleus, the repulsive electromagnetic force between each pair of protons is stronger than the attractive strong nuclear force between them. As a result, a nucleus made only of protons would be unstable and would fall apart. The nucleus, however, can also contain neutrons that, like the protons, attract each other and attract protons through the strong nuclear force. Since the presence of one or more neutrons increases the total strength of the attractive strong nuclear force within the nucleus without adding additional repulsive positive charges, neutrons moderate the repulsive forces between the protons. Given a sufficient number of neutrons (but not too many), a nucleus with two or more protons can be stable.

The nucleus of a carbon atom cannot hold itself together for more than a few minutes unless the nucleus contains at least six neutrons. Consequently, ¹¹C (carbon eleven, containing six protons and five neutrons) is unstable because the repulsive force of the six protons on each other is stronger than the attractive force of all eleven of the protons and neutrons for each other. But ¹²C, ¹³C and ¹⁴C, with six, seven and eight neutrons, respectively, and which are called carbon isotopes (isotopes are atoms with identical numbers of protons but different numbers of neutrons), do exist in nature. If we try to make a ¹⁵C atom (with 9 neutrons), it falls apart almost immediately; hence, only three isotopes of carbon exist naturally.

¹²C and ¹³C are stable, essentially forever. Carbon fourteen, however, is unstable. Eight neutrons are just too much of a good thing in a nucleus with only six protons. Being unstable, the ¹⁴C nucleus eventually undergoes a change; in this case one neutron decays, or falls apart, into a proton plus an electron and an antineutrino in a process triggered by a third force in nature, the weak nuclear force. After the neutron falls apart, the lightweight electron and the antineutrino are expelled from the nucleus while the heavier proton remains, yielding a nucleus with seven protons and seven neutrons. An atom with seven protons is the element nitrogen, and a nitrogen nucleus with seven neutrons and seven protons is nitrogen-fourteen (¹⁴N). The electron from this decay event (called a beta particle) flies out of the nucleus at very high speed and thus carries a tremendous amount of kinetic energy (energy contained in the motion of a particle). Eventually, when this high velocity electron collides with another particle, the enormous amount of kinetic energy it carries (the energy that was generated by the decay process) will be converted into heat energy. This process, in which a neutron falls apart into a proton and an electron, is called beta decay and is one of several known radioactive decay processes.

A second kind of radioactive decay process, called alpha decay, occurs when a nucleus fissions into two nuclei. One of these will be a small alpha particle (a nucleus containing exactly two protons and two neutrons; i.e., a helium nucleus); the other will contain all the other protons and neutrons that were in the original nucleus. The escaping alpha particle will collide with another particle and, as a result of the collision, deposit its kinetic energy as heat. Thus, we can think of both beta and alpha decays as sources of heat.

Radioactive Dating

Radioactivity is a physical process that simultaneously involves incredible precision and complete randomness. On the one hand, our ability to predict the fraction of a sample of radioactive material that will undergo radioactive decay during a specified time interval is extremely accurate. On the other hand, we lack the ability to determine exactly which atoms in our sample will decay.

The steps that allow us to determine the age of an object that contains radioactive materials are as follows. The length of time that will pass before half of our sample of radioactive material will decay is called the radioactive half-life. If we have four million radioactive radon atoms (the parent species), and if the half-life for this isotope of radon is 3.825 days, then after 3.825 days, half (or two million) of these atoms will have undergone radioactive decay into polonium (the daughter species); the other two million radioactive radon atoms will remain in their original condition. Before the clock started counting down the first 3.825 day interval and even during that interval, there would have been no way for us or anyone else to have identified which two million of the four million atoms would decay and which would be stable for that particular time interval. Our inability to identify which 50 percent of the radon atoms will decay is not due to technological limitations but to the very nature of the physics that governs the radioactive decay process. Nevertheless, we could have predicted with high accuracy that about two million of