Ussher did not give the precise time of day, but some (see below) have
claimed it would have been that corresponding to sunset in Jerusalem. The Web
site <http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html> gives sunset in
Jerusalem (latitude 31.78 north, longitude 35.22 east from another Web site)
tomorrow as 14:58 GMT (10:58 EDT, 9:58 CDT, 8:58 MDT, 7:58 PDT).
The first Web site above quotes Andrew D. White's book _A History of
the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom_ (D. Appleton and Co.,
1897, p. 9) as saying that later "Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his
time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the
Scriptures, that `heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all
together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water,' and that `this work
took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine
o'clock in the morning.'" Since the Bible (Genesis 1:26-27) records the
creation of man on the sixth day, Lightfoot would presumably have put the
initial moment of creation between 5 and 6 days earlier.
The Web site <http://www.wap.org/ifaq/science/ussher.html> titled,
"Bishop Ussher, Time Traveler," includes a picture of Ussher and says the
following:
__________________________________________________________________
James Ussher (1581-1656), an Irish theologian and scholar, at one time had
possibly the largest collection of books in Western Europe. A tireless
collector, he eventually donated the collection to Trinity College, Dublin,
which his uncle James Ussher helped found. During his lifetime he was widely
known as a defender of learning, of the value of books secular and sacred, and
a proponent of maintaining an independent identity for Irish Protestant faith.
He was appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1625.
But what he is really known for is his chronology of creation. Using the Book
of Genesis, he painstakingly followed the series of "begats" back in time and
determined that the universe was created in the year 4004 BC, on October 23.
(Refinements by others further pinpointed this to 9 a.m., London time, or
midnight in the Garden of Eden.) This chronology was inserted in the margins of
many editions of the Authorized Version of the Bible ("King James Version") in
the 19th century, and has been used as "proof" of the fallacy of evolution,
molecular biology, astrophysics and many other scientific endeavors in the 20th
century.
There is no evidence to show Ussher would approve of these recent "proofs."
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Oct. 23, 4004 B.C., by the Julian calendar (100 leap days per 400
years) would have been Aug. 22, 4004 B.C. by the more accurate Gregorian
calendar (97 leap days per 400 years, and now 13 days later than the Julian
calendar), so I'm confused as to why Ussher thought that date was the nearest
Sunday to the autumnal equinox that year, but of course there are much larger
errors in his calculation. It is amusing that if one takes the number of days
from Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. Julian to Oct. 23, 1997 A.D. Gregorian, N = 6000 x
365.25 - 13 = 2,191,487, and squares this, one gets N^2 days = 13,149,125,170
tropical years, which is well within the accepted current uncertainty of the
age of the universe, 14 \pm 4 Gyr according to David Schramm, "The Age of the
Universe," (FERMILAB-Conf-97/007-A, January 1997), which says the following:
____________________________________________________________________
The problem of estimating the age of the universe is longstanding. For
example, in 1650, Bishop James Ussher (1658) determined by a technique of
summing the Biblical begats ans making other corrections and connections based
on the then available historical and astronomical records that the universe
began in 4004 BC, at the moment what would correspond to sunset in Jerusalem on
the evening before October 23. This would correspond to 4 PM U.T. on October
22.
This early determination illustrates a key point which we will also
apply to more modern techniques. Namely, while Bishop Ussher was able to
obtain a result with reported accuracy of about 8 significant figures, his
systematic errors are considerably larger. (Even his intrinsic error is larger
than the accuracy of his result indicates, since the Jewish calendar, using
essentially the same technique, obtains an age that is over 200 years off from
Ussher's.)
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Actually, even the 10-18 billion year current estimate for the age of
the universe is just the age since the universe was very small and hot. If the
stochastic inflation picture developed by Andrei Linde and others is right,
there might have been an arbitrarily long period of inflation preceding the
current post-inflation epoch of the universe (whose age is that given by the
current estimates of the "age of the universe"). It is still uncertain (at
least to me) whether there was likely an infinite inflationary period during
which spacetime was sufficiently classical to be able to define a time period.
It might have been that the "arbitrarily long period of inflation" was "when"
the spacetime was so highly quantum (densities near the Planck density, etc.)
that this "period" cannot be well defined. But it does introduce a conceptual
uncertainty, which might be huge or even infinite, into the age of the
universe.
Don Page