Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
phrase comes originally from William Morris Davis, who, like Dan and Paul after him, was a profess-
or of geology at Harvard. In 1926, inspired by the extraordinary happenings in physics at the turn of
the century, he wrote a famous paper entitled “The value of outrageous geological hypotheses”. Here's
what he said:
Are we not in danger of reaching a stage of theoretical stagnation, similar to that of physics
a generation ago, when its whole realm appeared to have been explored? We shall be in-
deed fortunate if geology is so marvelously enlarged in the next thirty years as physics has
been in the last thirty. But to make such progress, violence must be done to many of our
accepted principles. And it is here that the value of outrageous hypotheses, of which I wish
to speak, appears. For inasmuch as the great advances in physics in recent years and as the
great advances of geology in the past have been made by outraging in one way or another a
body of preconceived opinions, we may be pretty sure that the advances yet to be made in
geology will be at first regarded as outrages upon the accumulated convictions of to-day,
which we are too prone to regard as geologically sacred.
9
Davis
wanted
people to take risks in geology. And he was sure that any important new theories
that stood a chance of invigorating the study of rocks would be outrageous. They would fly in the face
of our intuition, just as the new theories of physics had changed everyone's assumptions about how
clocks and rulers behaved.
That poses a particular problem, because geology is as much art as science. After geologists have
painstakingly assembled all the evidence that rocks have to offer, they still need a certain amount of
intuition for the interpretation. With physics or chemistry, you can test different mechanisms one by
one. But geologists are fond of saying that their experiment has already been done. They can't rerun
the Earth with slightly different conditions and see what happens. Instead they often have to use their
instincts.
And Paul and Dan are convinced that when it comes to the Snowball, you can't trust your instincts.
This was a world that didn't obey normal rules. “The Snowball is a different planet,” Dan says re-
peatedly. “You can't judge it by the same criteria we use today.” Instead you have to trust the evidence,
however strange it appears to be. And you have to be able to interpret it by thinking out of your skin.
This is something that suits Paul very well. He has spent his life running counter to convention. His
passion for music began as a teenager when he became gripped by atonal twentieth-century classical
music—the sort of music that breaks all the rules. Paul loved it precisely because it sounded so differ-
ent. “We were brought up to challenge everything. Conventional wisdom was bound to be wrong, and
so if you were unconventional at least you had a small chance of being right,” he says repeatedly.
Paul's family bears that out. At the age of nine, his sister Abby cut her hair, called herself “Ab”,
and joined the local boys' hockey team. She played a ferocious left defence for an entire season be-
fore she was picked for the all-stars and her sex was discovered. The story was plastered all over
the Canadian press. She was featured in
Time
and
Newsweek
. That was when Paul started calling her
Miss Canada. Abby went on to win Commonwealth Gold in the eight-hundred-yard sprint, represen-
ted Canada at four Olympic games, and became a famously outspoken member of the International
Olympic Committee.
But there are many occasions when imagination is no substitute for experience. Geology is all
about weary legs and backpacks weighed down with rock samples. It's about looking at the world you
see around you, whether as a record of times past, as an exemplar of the present or as a predictor of
the future. To be a geologist is to be rooted in the real world, to go with what you know.
