We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.
It's been eons since we last saw each other.
Originally there were only two eons, the Precambrian and the Phanerozoic.
A mainstay of building construction for eons, until recent years the product's drab gray mien was considered too cold for all but the most esoteric decorative purposes.
And through the eons there have been long periods of warming and cooling across the globe.
This mass of molten continent still, however, retains enough homogeneity to be returned more or less as a unit at the mid-ocean ridges eons later as the rock cycle continues.
Humankind has built up that understanding over the eons first and foremost by observing phenomena accurately, and then recording the observations assiduously.
When you see a natural stone formation, you are seeing the result of eons of active degradation and entropy.
The oyamel firs have held their ground on these volcanic hillsides for eons, and Mexico-bound monarchs will spend the winter nowhere else.
And unlike a lot of rock on Earth that has been unrecognizably recycled by volcanic activity over the eons, a lot of lunar material retains records of some of the first impacts.
Consequently, in his view, for eons philosophers have in essence been barking up the wrong tree.
Over the eons the lunar spin rate has been damped by Earth's gravity, because the Moon's mass distribution is not uniform.
The British arm of Germany utility EON is developing a giant battery to store wind power.
See the geologic time chart in the Reference Supplement
