Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
THE PAST AS KEY
TO THE PRESENT
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. ]
Alfred North Whitehead
RESISTANCE
After Luis Alvarez informed a physicist colleague that the absence
of Pu 244 in the boundary clay negated the supernova theory, he
received the reply: "Dear Luie: You are right and we were wrong.
Congratulations." To Luis, this response "exemplified science at its
best, a physicist reacting instantly to evidence that destroys a theory
in which he previously believed." 2 He could never understand why
the paleontologists did not react the same way.
He could have taken a lesson from the theory of continental
drift, which took decades to find acceptance among geologists. Early
in the nineteenth century, mapmakers and others had noted that
the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together like two
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In 1918, German meteorologist Alfred
Wegener extrapolated from this apparent coincidence to develop a
full-fledged theory, backed by a volume of geological evidence, that
held that continents are not fixed in place on the surface of the
globe, but drift about, colliding, welding together, and sometimes
separating along a new fracture. Each single piece of evidence that
Wegener presented, however, was circumstantial and therefore could
be ascribed to coincidence. Furthermore, he could present no plau-
sible mechanism to explain why the continents should have moved.
His idea failed to catch on and came to be regarded, at least by
American geologists, as having been falsified to the point of being
Search WWH ::




Custom Search