The Rock Philosophers

Every monday i have a class at the graduate center opposite the empire state building . its a nice place but i go there just once a week to listen to the research that my colleagues are doing.

Its interesting to see how people pick up such diverse areas of research ! today's proposal presentation was on geology . I shall not go into the nitty gritty details , but it will suffice to say that this presentation piqued my interest on the geological history of the earth

The journey back home with Damayanti was an experience of the geological order! She took me back 4.5 billion years ago into the Pre Cambrian age and then brought me to the present with interesting titbits of information on how sediment cores are drilled from ocean beds and how geologists count diatoms to obtain valuable information about the past!

I shall not delve more into scientific details of mass spectroscopy and carbon dating and make this a boring blog ...( thats assuming that its not already one hahahaha)

But strangely the discussion ended on philosophy! the motto of the geologist is

" THE PRESENT IS THE KEY TO THE PAST" & " TO KNOW THE PAST IS TO KNOW THE FUTURE!"

Some "rocky" philosophy this one!

Another interesting concept of geologists is that of "time scale"

Rapid or sudden to us is something that changes within a few hours or days . Rapid to a geologist is that which changes in 10,000 years or 1 million years depending on the era under study

So next time you bump into a "rock person" and he says I am in a hurry ... you know what he means ;)

Got a moment more to spare ? Take a look at this toilet paper timeline ;) and see where we humans stand on the geological scale!
TIMELINE