Geoscience Reference
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Romano of June 22, 1663: "Now that Signor Galileo, albeit under
slight inducement, has renounced his heretical belief in the earth's
motion, perhaps students of physics will return to the practical prob-
lems of armaments and navigation, and leave the solution of cosmo-
logical problems to those learned in the infallible sacred texts." 1 4
The attempt to debunk the Alvarez theory was not the first time
the New York Times recommended that scientists come to their
senses and follow its advice. In a 1903 editorial, the paper advised
aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley "not to put his substantial
greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his
time and the money involved in further airship experiments. Life is
too short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably
greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly." 1 3 How for-
tunate that neither Langley nor the Alvarezes paid any attention.
When an author feels compelled to exorcise predecessors dead
for over 100 years, when the paper that publishes "All the News
That's Fit to Print" feels entitled to weigh in on its editorial pages,
when theories are judged not on whether they meet scientific tests
but on whether they are required or satisfying, it is obvious that the
suggestion that earthly events have extraterrestrial causes leads other-
wise sober-minded folks to give sway to their emotions. But why
does an appeal to factors outside the earth produce such a negative
reaction? Geologists, at least, have a reasonable answer: Starting
with their first course in the subject, they have been taught that the
earth simply does not change in response to sudden catastrophes.
This notion of geology by catastrophe was disproven a century and
a half ago; to resurrect it in the late twentieth century would be to
return the science to its prescientific days.
No
POWERS
NOT
NATURAL TO
THE
GLOBE
The key concept underpinning the geologists' view that slow change
can accomplish everything is the vastness of geologic time. At some
point in the not-so-distant future, 1,000 years or 10,000 years from
now, when fossil fuels and valuable ore deposits are gone, the per-
manent contribution of geology surely will be the concept of the
limitless extent of geologic time—what John McPhee aptly calls
"deep time." This is a major intellectual contribution equivalent to
that of astronomy: the realization that the earth is not the center of
anything, rather it is an inconspicuous planet revolving around one
star among billions of stars, in one galaxy among billions of galaxies.
But although we can observe other planets, stars, and galaxies, a hu-
man lifetime is so short that deep time surpasses understanding. We
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