What an excellent read! Measuring Infinity traces the search for the time the Earth was created, a search that began as early as 400+ years AD, and ultimately the birth of the universe as well.

It covers the scientists we are all familiar with and those we have probably never heard of. It covers the exciting 'real' discoveries and the amusing 'mistakes'. It shows the great scientists, such as Newton and Einstein, making 'right' discoveries and their heartbreak when they were sometimes glaringly wrong.

The book shows the wide range of disciplines that were involved. The early naturalists - working to find answers through biology, fossils, geology and later the chemists and physicists.

The book is well written, telling you a tale of search, rather than being pages of data and formulas. It is a tale of people.

It's even fun. At the end of the 1600s, people were trying to explain how fossils were buried in so many layers of the earth, - if they had been deposited by the Flood. One explanation was that 'the water for the Flood came from an interior ocean hidden beneath the Earth's crust. In the normal state this was held in place by gravity, but at the time of the Flood, God had momentarily suspended the full force of gravity and the water had spilled out.' Later when God restored the gravity the fossils were sank by their density - therefore the heavier ones being lowest. ( )

History of finding the age of the world and universe. The second half is good, but too much space is wasted on prescientific imaginings -- if Gorst thinks I'm going to read scores of pages on Bishop Ussher and his ilk, ...