So I’m reading the new (September 2001) issue of National Geographic, and there’s a rather fascinating article about how scientists use various methods to find out how old things are.
Somewhere within the article they trot out the old “calculation” by James Ussher in the 17th Century that “God created the Earth in 4004 B.C. - on October 22, to be precise.” (This is on page 92, if you’re playing along at home.)
How did Ussher calculate 4004 BC, and how did he nail it down to 22 October?
Since the Gregorian calender has been adjusted since the 17th Century, would that date now be October 12?
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm Knock yourself out
Ten minutes! On a Saturday night!
Awesome!
Thanks samclem!
I {{{shudder}}} to think what that says about my life.
Basically, he took the number of years since Christ’s supposed birth (he was off by a few years, it seems), then he added up the ages of the Patriarchs mentioned in the Bible.
In short, he was making a very fancy-sounding guess.
That is a popular misconception, as the link samclem provided makes clear.
Even more importantly, the start of the current millennium occurred in 1997.
derleth
That page is pretty funny. Just before it exposes the world wide web as the mark of the beast, it points out that
pi = 3.1415926536 . . . .
can be interpreted as 666 in many ways–unfortunately, that last 6 is an error.
