Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Outsiders can make vital contributions because they have advantages that more
than compensate for their lack of disciplinary knowledge. They do not know the
mores of a given field and would be unlikely to uphold them if they did. One can
imagine that had anyone asked the Nobelists Luis Alvarez and Patrick Blackett
what they thought of uniformitarianism, the response would have been a puzzled
look.
Outsiders can resurrect a question that insiders have long stopped asking, either
because the insiders believe they have already answered the question or because
they have given up on ever finding the answer. Insiders may find it almost impos-
sible to change their mind publicly, which may be equivalent to renouncing their
life'swork.Withnorecordofpublicationandpronouncementstodefend,outsiders
have no baggage to jettison.
As the model of how insiders ought to proceed, we cannot do better than Harry
Hess. Though he rejected continental drift until the very end of the 1950s, Hess
never went out of his way to say so. He turned out to have been wrong, but he was
wrong for the right reasons, so perhaps he had not been wrong after all.
Inaninterviewneartheendofhislife,RobertDietzmadearevealingstatement:
“I looked at Harry Hess's paper here just . . . today. It is a brilliant paper, and he
certainly deserves credit. Looking at it, there are about nineteen conclusions there
at the end. I think that at least twelve of them are wrong given what we now know.
Of course he was right about some things.”
2
A scientist who makes nineteen claims, only seven of which turn out to be cor-
rect, is remembered for the seven, not criticized for the twelve. In fact, that sci-
entist will get credit for at least some of the twelve, for although those particular
claims turned out to be wrong, they provoked new research that advanced science.
In almost every other field of human endeavor, to be wrong is a failing and often
a fatal one. In science, being wrong is inevitable and indispensable. Science needs
its errors and can take pride in them.
Impossible!
In each of the four cases, some scientists said that the theory was not merely
wrong but impossible. This confirms Arthur C. Clarke's First Law: “When a dis-
tinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible (s)he is almost cer-
tainly right. When (s)he says that it is impossible, (s)he is very probably wrong.”
3
Meteorologists regarded Arrhenius's theory as already proven impossible by
Ångström's spectrography. Kelvin said it was “almost certain” that the Sun has
not illuminated the Earth for as much as 500,000,000 years. Harold Jeffreys pro-
