Evolution in biology begat other evolutions. The spirit of Darwinism was gifted to physicists. They, too, approached the question of the age of our planet, and the age of the Sun. First, they used thermodynamics, the branch of physics concerned with the dynamics of heat energy. Then, late in the nineteenth century, the nuclear age dawned. Radiometric dating—the technique for dating materials using naturally occurring radioactive isotopes—provided age-dating to fields as diverse as geology, astrophysics, and cosmology. We know now that the planetary systems of the Star Wars galaxy would have
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