Patterson estimated the age of the Earth to be 4.55 billion years, using lead in the interior.
While working under Harrison Brown, a research consultant at the University of Chicago, he was commissioned to conduct the geological aging of Zurcon by Harrison Brown Patterson, who realized Paterson’s immense ability to use mass spectroscopy. Therefore, if there is any lead in zircon, it must be from the fermentation of uranium. This process is called U-Pb dating .The team’s job was to measure the concentration and isotopic composition of the elements inside the zircon. Tilton tested the level of uranium and Patterson tested the level of lead in it. Patterson’s goal was to discover the structure of primitive lead on Earth. By doing so, the Earth can be used to understand the time of the solar system and, at the same time, the same techniques used in meteorites.
They knew the age of the igneous rock from which zircon came, and Tilton’s uranium levels matched what should have been in a zircon at that particular age. But there was always a lot of lead in Patterson’s data, so in 1953 Brown Patterson was brought to Caltech, where Patterson was able to build his own lab from scratch. In it he secured all the access points to air and other pollution. Patterson cleaned all the equipment with acid and did all the chemicals in the district. In essence, he created one of the first clean rooms to prevent lead contamination of his data. He was able to complete his work with the Canyon Diablo meteorite. A solitary iron-meteorite mass spectrometer from the Argon National Laboratory was used to collect information on the abundance of lead isotopes. Using new data, he discovered in 1956 that “the first paper to contain the true age of the Solar System’s accretion of meteorites and Earth” was 4.550Gy ± 70My.
Prior to this discovery, the public believed that the Earth was about 3.3 billion years old.
This is a more accurate calculation than it was before. Half a century after he calculated, science and technology have grown. Yet the time estimated by Patterson still remains unchanged.
Thomas Midgilli found that the addition of lead to petrol was sufficient to increase the engine performance of motor vehicles. He was also at the forefront of developing CFCs that use refrigeration. It was then used by several monopoly giants, General Motors, Standard Oil and DuPont. But none of them took lead poisoning seriously. Patterson came out against this. Patterson, who had spent his entire life researching lead, knew its disadvantages as well. Opponents of Patterson’s findings are, however, very powerful corporations. They paid for research and tried to make the presence of lead in the human body natural. He even experimented with fossils in Peru and Egyptian mummies to prove that the level of lead in the human body is not natural. This could lead to a ban on leaded petrol.
But even the scientist who discovered the age of the world had to face great opposition in front of the corporates. Global warming like this has been covered by oil companies for years. Many of the knowledge and changes we see today are the result of the work of many unnamed scientists.
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