October 23From the World of Religion: BIRTHDAY FOR THE WORLD
He was a very learned man. It is said that in his day he had one of the
largest libraries in all of Europe. He was a deeply religious man also. And
as a highly respected scholar he became vice-chancellor of Trinity College
in Dublin. He was also elevated to the archbishopric of Armagh in 1625. His
name was James Ussher.
I remember him today, not because this is his birthday, but because Ussher
was the first one to ascribe a birth date to the universe on a human
calendar. He did not hit upon this day in a random mode, not by pure
speculation. Rather, he arrived at it by a systematic analysis of
Chronology.
There are two types of chronology: one refers to the sequence of events in a
people's long history. Thus arise the various eras in various traditions.
These are constructed for the most part on the basis of secular historical
records or sacred-historical narratives. But they tell us little about the
age of the world.
The Book of Genesis links the creation of the world with the creation of Man
in a time frame. Furthermore, it gives a series of genealogies starting from
Homo-1 (Adam), as well as the time-span of their lives. From these data, if
one carefully considers all the sequential "begats" that are listed in the
Bible, one can, in principle, come to some reasonable conclusion about the
age of the world. This is what Bishop Ussher did, and he stated with some
confidence that the world was created in the year 4004 B.C.E. He was also
persuaded that this occurred in the autumnal season (in the Northern
hemisphere), in the month of October, and more exactly on the 23 of that
month.. One of his contemporaries, Sir John Lightfoot, a scholar of no less
eminence, announced with even greater precision, that, "heaven and earth,
centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant,
and clouds full of water," and all "this work took place and man was
created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the
morning." Of course he was referring to London time.
The bishop's work was published in 1658, and gradually the news spread to
many countries. In the authorized version of the Bible, published in 1701
this was included in a marginal note. Right until Victorian times in the
nineteenth century , it was accepted by many people in Christendom that the
world was indeed created in 4004 B.C.E. And probably many still do.
From our vantage point, armed with all the accumulated knowledge of and
insights into radioactivity and big bang, we may be tempted to chuckle at
Bishop Ussher's pronouncement, as some modernists are prone to do. But that
would be an example of anachronistic evaluation which is unfair to past
generations. We may be amused by people of our times holding on to such
views - and there are many -, but people like Ussher were pondering serious
problems utilizing the resources available to them at the time, as indeed
were the authors of the Book of Genesis and similar works in other cultures.
That they were concerned at all with question of cosmogenesis and
biogenesis, whether in ancient China, Greece, Egypt or India, is testimony
to their keen minds and indeed to the perennial expression of the human
spirit.
It is to be remembered that scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries extended the age of the universe only by a few more thousand
years. It was not until after the discovery of radioactivity and half-lives,
and in the dawn of the twentieth century that scientific minds could talk in
terms of billions of years. In this, interestingly enough, they brought us
back to the time stretches of the ancient Hindus who boldly took the world
to be a few billion years old.
From the World of Science: NICOLAS APPERT
One way or another, science (i.e. our knowledge and understanding of the
world) has touched human lives since time immemorial. And if we are to give
a few examples of this, many will be listed, but it is unlikely that the
first few items will include food-preservation. Yet, this is vital to human
survival, which is why since the most ancient times human beings learned to
preserve flesh and fish by smoking and salting, and milk by turning it to
butter and cheese. In our own times, there are many techniques like
refrigeration and the addition of preserving chemicals to keep food from
spoiling.
One of the remarkable features of natural foods (organic molecules) is that
they can remain for ever in perfectly stable condition: unless they are
eaten. The eating is done by peoples and animals, or by microorganisms
which are essentially what cause the deterioration of food, whether cooked
or uncooked. When an apple rots, microorganisms are at work.
This means that if we wish to keep food unaffected, we must keep the
microorganisms away. Better still, we must exterminate them, before they do
their work, because it is difficult to keep them away. It turns out that
most of them cannot survive in hot water, especially boiling water. So, in
principle, the technique is simple: Heat all edible food to 100 degrees
celsius to keep it unaffected by the animalicules.
In the modern world, one of the most widespread modes by which edible food
is kept edible for an extended period of time is by canning: a simple and
common technique which has become part of the food-distribution technology.
This is a fairly recent invention, dating back to only the first decades of
the nineteenth century. The credit for it goes to Nicolas Appert (born: 23
October 1752). A self uneducated man, Appert became a confectioner and a
chef in Paris in the 1780s. He was involved with the French Revolution, and
is said to have spent some prison time during the Reign of Terror.
Preserved food is extremely important for soldiers far away from home, for
sailors who would be for long at sea: In 1795, the post-Revolutionary French
government offered a tidy prize to anyone who would come up with a technique
for preserving food.
As a chef, and also as one interested in chemistry, Appert did experiments
on food for fourteen years before he published his method. It must be
remembered that modern chemistry was still in its infancy in the latter half
of the eighteenth century. Nor was bacteriology a science, so no one really
knew how food gets putrefied, though all knew it does. Appert felt that if
food could be sufficiently heated and quickly transferred to a can, and the
can is sealed air tight, the food could be preserved for a very long time.
This was his great discovery, and he made it after a series of experiments.
When he presented his results, the government was very impressed, but the
bureaucracy would not say okay right away. Finally, they gave him the prize
money and insisted he should write all of this. He wrote a book whose title,
translated into English, would be "The art of conserving all animal and
vegetable substances for several years." To an extent it was an art, but
mostly it was a technique whose scientific basis would be elucidated only
during the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the world of
Louis Pasteur (see December 27). Pasteur recognized him. Appert also
concocted the bouillon cube with which one can make instant soup. He
established a company which produced scores of edibles in cans, and was
thriving for more than a century. But he did not patent his invention.
V. V. Raman
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