Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Paul saw plenty of parallels between his Snowball idea and Wegener's theory. Like the Snowball,
continental drift (or, more strictly speaking, its later incarnation as the theory of plate tectonics) can
explain many disparate puzzles under one elegant umbrella. As soon as you allow the continents to
move, many other things follow. Where continents separate, they produce oceans. Where they collide,
they make mountains. Where plates rub against each other, they can stick and suddenly slip, rumpling
the Earth's skin with an earthquake. New seafloor is formed along the hitherto mysterious great ridges
that run through the centres of the oceans like giant backbones. Old seafloor disappears by plunging
down trenches at the edges of continents. Volcanoes form in the crust above these trenches. When the
wet seafloor plummets into the Earth's interior, water creeps up into the overlying rocks, encouraging
them to melt and spill their hot load on to the planet's surface. One idea explains all.
Also like Paul, Wegener was vilified as much for his
approach
as for his ideas. Wegener offended
his opponents by the very way he reported his research. In his topic
The Origin of Continents and
Oceans
, he described his initial insight as an “intuitive leap”. Intuition, many geologists felt, had no
place in science. And there was worse to come. When Wegener discovered that fossils from South
America uncannily matched those found in Africa and that the geology matched eerily too, he per-
formed, he said, a “hasty analysis of the results of research in this direction in the spheres of geology
and palaeontology, whereby such important confirmations were yielded that I was convinced of the
fundamental correctness of my idea.”
2
He made a “hasty analysis”? He was convinced that he was correct? These sorts of comments
deeply disturbed geologists, who felt that Wegener was far from dispassionate about his ideas. “My
principal objection to the Wegener hypothesis,” thundered one critic, “rests on the author's method.
This, in my opinion, is not scientific, but takes the familiar course of an initial idea, a selective search
through the literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed to the
idea, and ending in a state of auto-intoxication in which the subjective idea comes to be considered
objective fact.”
3
Another critic, Bailey Willis, said that Wegener's topic describing the theory of continental drift
gave the impression of having been “written by an advocate rather than an impartial investigator”.
Märchen” [a fairy tale].) Joseph Singewald claimed that Wegener had “set out to prove the theory . . .
rather than to test it” and accused him of “dogmatism”, “overgeneralizing”, and “special pleading”.
5
Ever since Wegener's vindication, proponents of a controversial idea in geology like to align them-
selves with him, and Paul does this a lot. Of course, there was nothing to prove conclusively in 1912
that Wegener was right, and he might have turned out in the end to be wrong. But still, the Wegener
story is a cautionary tale to all geologists not to dismiss extraordinary ideas out of hand.
“Good ideas, when they're young, they're vulnerable,” Paul said to me at a conference in Reno.
“They're a pain in the ass, so you want to trash them. But the danger is the old ideas that everyone has
got comfortable with. With a new idea, you have to cultivate it and let it grow and see where it takes
you, and if you do, I think you'll learn faster where it's wrong than if you stomp all over it.”
A few weeks later he sent me the following quote from Mott T. Greene, a biographer of Wegener:
Throughout the entire course of the debate [about Wegener's theory] neither his supporters
nor his detractors seemed to have the clear grasp of a theory which comes from having
read it carefully. The reason for this is a kind of guilty secret: most scientists read as little
as they can get away with anyway, and they do not like new
theories
[Greene's emphas-
is] in particular. New theories are hard work, and they are dangerous—it is dangerous to
