ABSTRACT
The theory behind Gerling’s approach was essentially that adopted by all future age-of-the- earth investigators. Several months after Claire Patterson orally presented his results in America, a paper by Houtermans appeared in the Italian science journal Nuovo Cimento entitled ‘Determination of the age of the earth from the isotopic composition of meteoritic lead’. Patterson’s brilliant analytical work was immediately widely acknowledged and his value of 4.5 billion years for the age of the earth has become effectively universally accepted. In a sense, the extraordinary two-millennia quest for our understanding of the age of the earth is over. Patterson applied his sophisticated analytical techniques to stone meteorites which were presumed to have been formed at the same time as the iron meteorites and the earth and to have trapped the same initial primeval lead.
