Geoscience Reference
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the same logical approach, he got the origin of lunar craters and the probability of
terrestrial craters right—and almost no one agreed with him.
In the two decades following the “Origins” paper, Meteor Crater, as the feature
came to be known, gave rise to much new and significant evidence. Yet, betraying
his professed philosophy, for the rest of his life Gilbert never wrote nor said a
single wordpublicly about the former Coon Mountain. His reaction to repeated en-
treaties to do so was simply to ignore them. Neither he nor Chamberlin was able
to live up to the lofty principles embodied in the method of multiple working hy-
potheses. Perhaps to do so is simply beyond human nature.
The long shadow that Gilbert cast over impact studies stretched to 1959, sixty-
four years after his Washington address on the origin of hypotheses, when another
USGSgeologistshowedthatGilberthadbeenwrongaboutMeteorCrater.In1983,
that geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, would win the G. K. Gilbert Award of the
Geological Society of America.
