James Hutton
1726–1797 · Scottish · Enlightenment
Known for: Father of modern geology who proposed deep time and uniformitarianism
James Hutton looked at rocks and saw billions of years of history. He proposed that the same geological processes operating today have always operated—uniformitarianism—and that the Earth is immensely old. His vision of 'deep time' was radical when the Earth was thought to be 6,000 years old.
'We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end'—possibly the most mind-expanding sentence in the history of science.
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