From Stone to Star chronicles one of the great scientific adventures of our time. Written by the eminent geochemist Claude Allegre, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the sophisticated isotopic detective work that has established a geologic chronology of the earth and transformed our understanding of its genesis and history. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe geologists exploring the earth's surface collected fossils and hotly debated the origin of the layered and folded rocks in which they were embedded.

The development of seismology, the study of earthquakes, in...