Abstract
I WISH to appeal to my fellow geologists and workers in the rapidly growing subject of geochronology to discontinue a habit or fashion which is both unnecessary and misleading. I refer to the habit of calling radiometric ages ‘absolute’ ages. An age does not become ‘absolute’ by virtue of being expressed in units of time such as a year. If ‘absolute’ means anything at all, it implies complete independence of all events and relationships. But a year is a relationship and, moreover, our conviction that one year equals another is merely a convenient pragmatic hypothesis. As St. Augustine recognized long ago, there can be no real standard of time as there is of length or space, since the ‘time’ taken by an event passes away and cannot be brought back to be measured, as a metre rod can be measured by placing it alongside a standard metre rod. Yet we do not go out of our way to say that the ‘absolute’ length of the rod is one metre. Kor if you ask a man of forty-five how old he is, does he reply “My absolute age is forty-five years”.
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Nature, 196, 665 (1962).
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HOLMES, A. ‘Absolute’ Age: a Meaningless Term. Nature 196, 1238 (1962). https://doi.org/10.1038/1961238b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1961238b0
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