Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
All This Rubbish
I Keep My Ships at Sea
Though by the 1970s the majority of geologists had come to accept drift, some
never did: Bucher, Ewing, and Jeffreys, for example. How should we judge these
dissenters? They were wrong, but it is the fate of scientists to be wrong. The best,
like Hess, take pride in their errors and move on to the next novel suggestion. But
those who continue to insist they were right the first time, in spite of accumulating
evidence to the contrary, are stuck forever with their original belief. They are en-
titled to their opinions, but they can also influence their students and followers to
stick with them long past the time at which dissent is reasonable.
As the person responsible for the collection of most of the data that led to the
discovery of plate tectonics, Maurice Ewing is the most interesting dissenter. In his
memorialtributetoEwing,hislongtimecolleagueEdwardBullardnotedLamont's
contributions as well as Ewing's preference for data over theory:
Ewing took remarkably little part in the controversy that raged between 1955 and 1965. He
probably thought that work at sea would make all such things clear, as in fact it did. . . .
Ewing and his group discovered more new things about the Earth than any other group has
ever done before. He himself was primarily interested in finding what was there. Lamont was
set up for this purpose, “Observatory” was, perhaps, the right name; the emphasis was on data
gathering and on its immediate interpretation and not on global theory. 1
Ewing, who bragged that he had never taken a geology course, had learned the
subject from Bucher. Frankel quotes a letter from a former student at Columbia
who wrote: “Ewing considered Bucher 'the greatest living geologist.'” In his
courses, the letter writer said, Bucher “did his best, which was very good, to
destroy the arguments of Wegener.” Frankel judges that Ewing simply accepted
without question Bucher's arguments against continental drift. 2
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