Bibliographic record
Abstract
The writings of Niels Stensen (Steno) on mineral growth and modification in his Prodromus, together with his work on time and process in other solids, are here synthesized as five classes of time features defined by changes in the visible continuity of either or both chemistry and orientation. This organization highlights Steno’s implicit recognition of the fractal, scale-invariant nature of natural time features with regard to space, time, and material. The effectiveness and validity of this Stenonian geochronology framework is demonstrated down to atom scale with modern case studies of the U-Pb geochronology mineral zircon from samples originating from the Earth, Moon, and Mars and spanning most of solar system history. Recently discovered nano-scale features, here termed chronostructures, were intimated by Steno in his corpuscular view of mineral behaviour. The remarkable advances in the Prodromus are seen here as a resulting from the intersection of Steno’s highly attuned approach to visual perception, his adoption of Stoic (Senecan) ethics early in his career to guide his natural philosophy, and the influence of the Galilean scientific environment of Florence. It is shown that, by virtue of its scale-invariant and intensive properties, Stenonian geochronology continues to serve as an independent and critical check on the accuracy of absolute geochronology measurements of geologic time given the latter’s inherent dependence on sample volume and the assumption of the chemically closed system. In this way Steno’s scientific legacy continues to help propel human understanding of how we see our place in time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".