The Clean Room Once there was a man who went searching for the true age of the earth. In his struggles to discover it, he stumbled on a grave threat. Beautiful spring day, Pasadena, California. Business is booming, life's good. Except for one man, a geochemist named Clair Patterson, known as Pat. He knows that everyone he sees is in danger from an invisible menace. And he's determined to put a stop to it, no matter what the cost. You can't really tell Pat Patterson's story without going all the way back to the time long before the earth, our home, was built, when the stars brought forth its substance. Iron. For the planet's molten core. Oxygen. For the rocks and the water and the air. Carbon. For diamonds. And life. A star is born, ours. For the first few million years, things ran smoothly as dust grains snowballed into progressively larger objects. But once these objects grew massive enough to have sufficient gravity, they began pulling each other into crossing orbits. This is how our world looked when it was new. No part of the earth's surface could survive intact from that time to the present. So, with all its birth and early childhood records erased, how could we ever hope to know with any certainty the ge of our world? People have been wondering about this since antiquity. In 1650 archbishop James Ussher of Ireland made a calculation that seemed to settle the question. Like almost everyone else of his time and his world, he accepted the biblical account of creation as authoritative. But the Bible does not give exact years, so Ussher searched for an event in the Old Testament that corresponded to a known historical date. He found it in the second book of kings, the death of the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar in 562 B. C. Usher added up the generations of the prophets and the Patriarchs, the 139 "Begats" of the Old Testament, between Adam and the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and discovered that the world began on October 22 in the year 4004 B. C.
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