Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Prelude to the Game
- A Brief History of Time
- Darwin's Sorest Trouble
- Mysterious Rays
- Doomsday Postponed
- Holidays in Mozambique
- This Vegetable Prison
- A Brimful of Promise
- Liquid Gold in Yenangyaung
- Durham Days
- The Ardnamurchan Affair
- Rewards and Retributions
- Why does the Sun Shine?
- The Age of Uranium
- The Age of the Earth
- Loose Ends
- Thanks and Acknowledgements
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Liquid Gold in Yenangyaung
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Prelude to the Game
- A Brief History of Time
- Darwin's Sorest Trouble
- Mysterious Rays
- Doomsday Postponed
- Holidays in Mozambique
- This Vegetable Prison
- A Brimful of Promise
- Liquid Gold in Yenangyaung
- Durham Days
- The Ardnamurchan Affair
- Rewards and Retributions
- Why does the Sun Shine?
- The Age of Uranium
- The Age of the Earth
- Loose Ends
- Thanks and Acknowledgements
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There have always been optimistic operators willing to risk their capital and take a chance by sinking ‘wildcat’ wells on sites selected for some quite unscientific reason.
Arthur HolmesBy the end of the war Holmes was still at Imperial College, still only a demonstrator and still on a salary of £150 a year, despite having published three books and gained a significant reputation for his work on radiometric dating. His finances were permanently under pressure such that when Maggie gave birth to their son Norman within two weeks of Armistice Day in 1918, they became critical. He had tried to get other jobs but despite being awarded the doctorate dreamt about in his letters from Mozambique, somehow no job had materialised either before, during or after the war. Watts had tried to get him a position as lecturer in petrology at Oxford ‘but naturally failed!’; he had testimonials from many eminent geologists for his application to Cardiff; but in 1919 he could not even get a teaching job at Aberystwyth. He wrote to Dr Prior:
I am glad to tell you that Aberystwyth failed to appreciate my qualifications for the geology post and appointed a student (Welsh!) instead. The department is very small and crowded and its chief objective appears to be to train girls to pass examinations to be teachers. So I am well out of it!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dating GameOne Man's Search for the Age of the Earth, pp. 118 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012