Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
enunciating some words in a sentence, and then unaccountably rushing and garbling the rest. His short
dark hair curls slightly over his forehead and around his temples. He has an engaging, self-deprecating
smile. His face is clean-shaven and square, and his build is muscular. He's more football player than
long-distance runner. He prides himself on his fitness.
The world of ancient geology is a small one, and Nick and Paul Hoffman have known each other
for years. They first met on a Christmas expedition to the Grand Canyon in 1974, when Paul was
thirty-three and already a well-established geologist, and Nick was a callow young graduate student
of twenty-one, fresh off the boat from England. The North Americans on the trip were kind to their
young English colleague. They lent him extra clothes at night when his sleeping bag proved woefully
inadequate. They included him in their arguments about geology, bebop and baseball. They called him
“Blick”.
Paul in particular made a big impression. Even back then, Paul had a reputation as a very talented
field geologist who was both a “doer” and a “thinker”. Nick was eager to learn from him. But the
memory that stayed with Nick most strongly came on the day the group was climbing out of the
canyon up the Kaibab trail. Though the climb was steep, Nick wasn't particularly worried. He'd spent
the previous three years rowing for his college in Cambridge. He was strong and fit, an outdoors type
well used to holding his own on arduous hikes. He was also used to being first up the mountain. That's
why he remembers so keenly the moment when a lean, spare Paul Hoffman overtook him from be-
hind. The trail was as steep as it gets in the Grand Canyon, but Paul was almost running. There was
no catching him. As the rest of the group watched in astonishment, he tore up the hill and disappeared.
Paul swears he didn't do this for effect. “I just climb fast,” he said, shrugging. But effect it certainly
had. “He left us for dust,” Nick told me. “It was certainly impressive.” And he threw back his head
and laughed.
At first, Nick hadn't intended to gun for the Snowball theory. He was already involved in too many
other arguments. In a way, you could call Nick a professional critic. He is famous for picking away at
the threads of theories until he finds a detail that unravels the whole thing. But that kind of criticism
takes time and trouble. Nick was forever coming across theories he disagreed with—some were big
overarching ideas like the Snowball, others were arcane details of rock behaviour. He wouldn't have
the energy to try to disprove them all. “Life is too short,” he told me once. And if the Snowball had
been fated to disappear back into cosy obscurity, Nick would probably have stayed out of it.
His opposition had grown, though, after Paul turned up at Nick's home institution to give a Snow-
ball lecture. Paul arrived late. He had been caught—ironically enough—in a snowstorm driving down
to New York from Boston. One of his tyres had been cut by jagged ice on the road, and he'd had to
replace it in the nasty driving sleet at the roadside. The folks at Lamont Doherty had almost given up
on Paul when he finally arrived.
Lamont's genteel buildings are set on a lovely old estate just outside New York. It's one of the
world's top places for studying the way the Earth works, and it is famous for being fiercely competit-
ive. Scientists there are actively encouraged to comment on and criticize other people's work. Interac-
tions are forthright and robust. Paul knew well that if you take a new idea to Lamont, you'd better be
ready for a fight.
So Paul went into Lamont with all guns firing. And as Nick listened to the talk, he became in-
creasingly incensed. Paul used words like “panacea” and “triumph”, the sort of words that bring Nick
out in a rash. He hates big ideas that purport to explain everything. In his view, they are invariably
wrong. And the people who advocate them nearly always end up sweeping inconvenient details under
the carpet. That's why details matter so much to Nick. The world, he says, is complicated and the only
