I thought some of the open space community might be interested in this online event. Lots of juicy food for thought about emergence, systems, and other fascinating things! Join Alan Cutler, author of The Seashell on the Mountaintop, in an online Chautauqua session starting June 15th at http://groupjazz.com/chautauqua/current.html
Registration is free. In the bestselling tradition of The Map that Changed the World and Longitude comes the tale of a seventeenth-century scientist-turned-priest who forever changed our uderstanding of the Earth and created a new field of science. It was an ancient puzzle that stymied historys greatest minds: How did the fossils of seashells find their way far inland, sometimes high up into the mountains? Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing. Texts no less authoritative than the Old Testament laid out very clearly the timescale of Earths past; in fact one Anglican archbishop went so far as to calculate the exact date of Creation October 23, 4004, B.C. A revolution was in the making, however, and it was started by the brilliant and enigmatic Nicholas Steno, the man whom Stephen Jay Gould called the founder of geology. Steno explored beyond the pages of the Bible, looking directly at the clues left in the layers of the Earth. With his groundbreaking answer to the fossil question, Steno would not only confound the religious and scientific thinking of his own time, he would set the stage for the modern science that came after him. He would open the door to the concept of deep time, which imagined a world with a history of millions or billions of years. And at the very moment his expansive new ideas began to unravel the Bibles authoritative claim as to the age of the Earth, Steno would enter the priesthood and rise to become a bishop, ultimately becoming venerated as a saint and beatified by the Catholic Church in 1988. Combining a thrilling scientific investigation with world-altering history and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, The Seashell on the Mountaintop gives us new insight into the very old planet on which we live, revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in rock and stone. About the Author Alan Cutler has a Ph.D. in geology and is a writer affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Cutler was a contributing editor to The Forces of Change: A New View of Nature, and his articles have appeared in The Washington Post and The Sciences, among other publications. He lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Lisa Kimball Group Jazz,Suite 440 5335 Wisconsin Ave.NW Washington,DC 20015 Phone:+1 202.686.4848 Fax:+1 202.966.3772 http://www.groupjazz.com [email protected] * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
