Much ado about (practically) nothing: a history of the noble gases by David E. Fisher

Author:David E. Fisher [Fisher, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Science, History, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, USA, Physics, Inorganic, Chemistry, 9780195393965, Oxford University Press, Gases; Rare
ISBN: 9780195393965
Publisher: Oxford University Press US
Published: 2010-09-16T03:30:38.042000+00:00

t h e a r g o n s u r p r i s e

S 131

Needless to say, we were not a hit. In fact we were so not a hit that our repertory group tossed in the towel; the directors had been counting on ticket sales of the play replenishing a bankrupt treasury. So there I was, a playwright without a play or an acting company and a scientist with not the faintest idea of what to do with the mass spectrometer that the NSF had just given me a quarter of a million dollars for.

It was the next day that Paul Gast walked in the door. He

was one of the country’s leading geochemists, working out of the Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty)

of Columbia University. His early death in 1973 was a sad blow to earth science. This day, however, he was in good health and high spirits. He was returning from a research cruise that had docked in South America, and he had stopped for a visit in

Miami on his way home. I had never met him before, but he

strode into my offi ce and said, without preamble, “You are one lucky bastard.”

“Huh?” was all I could say.

“I sat on your NSF panel,” he explained. So he knew I was

getting a mass spectrometer from them.

I shook my head. “Not so lucky. It turns out we can’t measure the age of the—”

“That doesn’t matter!” he practically shouted. It turned out that he was also one of the referees for the paper we had sent in to Science reporting on the problem of excess argon in the oceanic rocks. “Doesn’t matter at all,” he repeated. “There’ll be other ways of measuring ages,5 but you’ve got something unique!”

“I do?”

He laughed. “What you’ve got here is a deep earth probe. You can look right into the mantle!”

5. He was a bit optimistic about that. Twenty years later, in 1987, I attended a work-shop at Northwestern University convened to look into possible methods of dating oceanic rocks. There was still no way of doing it. Even today there is no generally applicable method, although in some circumstances reliable ages can be determined.

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