Contact
How to get in touch
By email
Email: sean.mcmahon@ed.ac.uk
By post
Dr S. McMahon
Room 1508
James Clerk Maxwell Building
School of Physics and Astronomy
Peter Guthrie Tait Road
Edinburgh EH9 3FD
United Kingdom
NB: The road is named after a scientist of some importance in the history of planetary science and geobiology. Peter Guthrie Tait (1831-1901) was a physicist known, among other things, for defending Lord Kelvin's erroneous estimate of the age of the Earth (derived from the time required for Earth to cool from a molten state to its present temperature — it was not understood that radioactivity continually replenishes the supply of internal heat). He thought this kind of physics-based argument made theories of evolution over millions of years untenable. “We cannot give [the geologists] more scope for speculation than about ten or (say at most) fifteen million years,” he wrote. If Darwin, Lyell, and the other geologists required more than that to support their evolutionary theories, well, "so much the worse for geology". We try to take a less confrontational approach to interdisciplinary research in the McMahon Group.
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