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When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience
Lasrick writes "I Love this article in Smithsonian by Richard Conniff. One of my geology professors was in grad school when the theories for plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, etc., were introduced; he remembered how most of his professors denounced them as ridiculous. The article chronicles the introduction of continental drift theory, starting a century ago with Alfred Wegener. From the article: 'It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He was, of course, right. Continental drift and the more recent science of plate tectonics are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer vital questions like where to find precious oil and mineral deposits, and how to keep San Francisco upright. But in Wegener’s day, geological thinking stood firmly on a solid earth where continents and oceans were permanent features.'"
"I Love this article in Smithsonian by Richard Conniff. One of my geology professors was in grad school when [...]
It's always the little details that insufferably nag you. For example, after reading this poorly written (or edited) summary, I will always be haunted by the ambiguity of whether Richard Conniff was actually the submitter's geology professor, or if those two references without any explicit tying together are just that. I will carry this burden to my grave.
So the OP's professor was in grad school circa-1912?
Also, a lot of people don't realize (and the OP confirms) that almost all geological science to date has been funded by oil and mining companies.
denounced them as ridiculous
It was completely ridiculous before atomic energy and computers.
In a pre-atomic era, there seems to be no rational way to avoid a frozen solid earth. Frozen solid = no movement.
Virtually no effort was put into why the continents move and it took decades to come up with a reasonable story based on all kinds of wild fluid dynamics.
He was, of course, right.
He was, of course, making irrational stuff up, that accidentally happened to turn out to be correct. Kind of like the ancient greek version of atomic theory.
If real, usable, economic warp speed spacecraft propulsion is ever invented, that doesn't mean the "star trek" writers should get credit.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So your professor must be what, 120 years old? Sounds like you've decided to personalize this one to suit your needs.
Wegener's idea of continental drift was correct, but he didn't have a good mechanism for how these continents could plow through oceanic crust to move. That takes a massive force, and there wasn't enough energy to do it.
Later it was realized the continents were relatively light and floated atop moving plates. That provided a mechanism where the internal heat engine of the earth could provide enough energy to make them move.
It wasn't just stodginess that kept Wegener's idea from being accepted. It was also real physical objections. Until the 50s/60s and the discovery of seafloor spreading from the patterns of magnetisation in the seabed, the dynamics just didn't work out.
Now, in hindsight, it's "obvious". But it certainly wasn't at the time. The matching of geological features was intriguing, but without a mechanism for the continents moving, it couldn't overcome the objections.
Sir Francis Bacon remarked in 1620 that it is no accident that the western and eastern hemispheres appear to fit together.
Continents don't "drift" on the ocean like Wegener imagined, rather the motion of continents is caused by continental and oceanic plates engaging in tectonic events.
I believe the term "Pseudoscience" is reserved for "not even wrong" type things. The scientists of the era considered him incorrect in his conclusions, not pseudoscientific.
I am not an astonomer, but I seem to recall much debate regarding the the very existence of exoplanets. Now we take their existence for granted even though they are difficult to detect. I always wondered why there was even any debate regarding the subject? Why did scientists even bothering with that particular argument?
for advancing heliocentrism.
Because when he did, he insisted that all orbits around the sun were perfectly circular. He rejected the idea of elliptical orbits -- an idea that had already been proposed. As a result, the mathematics involved in his model to calculate the "movement" of the stars was significantly less accurate than the then-current and accepted model using epicycles.
But he was right, generally, even if he got the specifics wrong.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Wegener was correct about the continents moving around, and amassed plenty of evidence that the continents were once grouped together into the supercontinent of Pangaea (e.g., similar land animals and plants in rocks of the Carboniferous and Permian on continents now separated by wide oceans). But he was completely wrong about the mechanism. He proposed that the continents were plowing through the ocean crust kind of like icebergs floating on the sea, but when you work out the physics of that situation, the ocean crust is too strong to allow that to happen (continental lithosphere is too weak, and you'd crush them before being able to push them through the oceanic lithosphere even if a suitable force were applied). So, without a valid mechanism that made physical sense, geologists rejected his model. Plate tectonics didn't originate until the 1960s or 1970s when people realized that, essentially, the oceanic lithosphere was moving along with the continents, being formed at mid-oceanic ridges and destroyed at subduction zones, so the physical problems with Wegener's original continental drift no longer applied. People often think continental drift and plate tectonics are the same theory, but they are fairly different. The largely rejected original theory transformed into the new, modern one. Wegener still deserves a lot of credit for bringing together the evidence that the Earth's surface really did move, and by the 1970s that motion was directly measurable. It's pretty cool to imagine that every year the distance between, say, Europe and North America, gets a few cm longer.
I sensed, more than saw, a comparison between global warming and Wegener's model. In my opinion that would be far fetched, because no one had a penny in Wegener's theory, whilst global warming has spawned an "industry" across accademia, manufacturing, tax farming that only in Italy, where I leave, is worth 110 Bn Euros a year, and in Germany approximately twice that.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I understand and very much appreciate the point of the article.
A similar situation happened, as I understand it, with the idea that ulcers were caused by h.pylori - a huge level of institutional resistance to a clever new insight, eventually realized to be true to the point of "how did we not see how obvious this was"? Heck, germ theory itself and the idea of sterilization fought the same uphill battle.
Nevertheless, when reading the always-popular stories about the "outsiders" with the "radical" new theory fighting uphill to achieve fame and ultimate confirmation and vindication, it's always important to keep in mind that this DOESN'T imply any sort of validation for every crackpot theory that's out there. There are a lot of very, very stupid ideas that are reviled BECAUSE they're wrong.
Being very self-assured and certain you're right has nothing to do with actually being right. Life isn't a storybook. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In the case of the OP, it took the discovery of evidence that made the energy-level math work out. Before that, even though the theory (today) seems to be right, it was CORRECT that mainstream science rejected it until it was supportable.
Sometimes you might have a great idea, and you might even be right, but it may take longer than your lifetime for it to finally be proved.
-Styopa
But I call it Pangaean genocide.
Your analogy is bad. Man-caused global warming has been around as a theory for a very long time. It's something that climatologists are split on whether or not its happening. Most on both sides say it's way too early to make any predictions about, since wide variations happen over short time frames, which are long time frames by todays standards.
The reason that global warming is talked about so much is not because of scientists, but because of politicians. Remember that Al Gore said that our last chance to stop it was "now" because if we wait until 2000, it would be too late. If we didn't get rid of oil based methods of transportation by 2000, nothing would matter any more. His book outright stated that we would all be better off if we just buried our cars. After that didn't happen, he then formally changed his prediction to say that the North 'polarized' (sic) ice cap would be gone in 2009.
The hype from politicians has sold. Most people believe in this pseudo-science today. I think this article is a good reminder that things that seem obvious to some people today may seem silly years later.
I can't count how many friends of mine have replaced their 4-year old washing machine with a new piece of crap with thinner metal parts, just because it claimed to be more efficient, and the consumer wanted to spend their money to "save the environment". The result is that we have 3x as many washing machines entering our landfills each year, compared to the past. Cash for Clunkers was another perfect example of increased consumerism in the guise of saving the environment. This type of idiocy has to stop.
Someone is probably going to tell me to "not feed the trolls", and they're probably right.
...that all the continents were lumped together into one big continent?
I'm no geologist, but that doesn't seem to pass the sniff test.
I'm not saying that continental drift didn't occur, but I have a hard time believing that everything started out as one giant continent (given the current state of affairs, for one thing).
>Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience
So was Einstein's and Copernicus theories. Copernicus looked at the prevaling theories at the time and thought they didn't make sense. It was more intuitive to think of the sun as the center of the solar system. He then went out to try and prove his theory. (A history of science will show that that's how most scientific discovery is made.) Imagine how terrible it would have been had we demanded that his theories stand to rigid scientific theory while he was still developing his ideas. In today's scientific climate, he would be a laughing stock.
We tend to treat bourgening theories that compete or don't quite fit with our current world view as nearly herectical. (And don't think that because we don't burn people at the stake that we don't treat them as heritics. The fact that we don't follow such pratices is more a quality of modern day society than anything else. We punish the people as severily as society will allow.) Slashdot is particularily guilty of this, which is unfortunate because that is the process by which truly paradigm shattering science comes to be.
Ha, now all you slashdotters beating up on ID will be eating your words when it becomes the foundation of modern evolutionary theory!
It's the same thing that is happening with the Gaia Hypothesis today. Rejected by both biologists and geologists without examination (based on popular mis-stated re-interpretations of the book). The most useless criticism I've heard from Biology--the Science--is that there is no control mechanism.
But apparently there is a control mechanism (called DNA) for single cells, grouped cells such as lichens, multicellular animals (DNA controls the individual cells AND the multiple cell reproduction), trees (which include individual cells, leaves and constructed spaces such as sap tubes) and wolves, including their pack behavior. But DNA cannot control anything larger such as Gaia. Demonstrates to me the myopia written about in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution.
Read The Gaia Hypothesis yourself if you consider yourself a scientist.
Because when he did, he insisted that all orbits around the sun were perfectly circular. He rejected the idea of elliptical orbits -- an idea that had already been proposed.
It's actually much worse than that. Galileo made up a lot of stuff that went contrary to empirical data, and he claimed that all sorts of things were "true" when there was no empirical data to support them. See this article: http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=433
Of course, Galileo was a great scientist and more of an empiricist than a lot of his peers in other matters. But on the heliocentrism question, his evidence was pretty darn murky (and perhaps even should be considered downright "unscientific").
And now Expanding Earth Theory is considered pseudo-science...
I am not a geologist, but I find it a pretty interesting theory.. and the author makes a good case.. The site is interesting reading and is a good example of thinking outside the conventional norms. And is also another example of scientists ridiculing a theory while (seemingly?) failing to debunk it.
Everyone likes to point out how the scientists originally objected to this idea. But that's how the process works-- they shoot everybody down, and the ones that turn out to be bulletproof get to come join them. You've got to compare this to every other institution on the planet: the Democrats? The Catholics? the Star Trek fans? Who else has a mechanism in place that allows them to change their views as new information comes to light? Only the scientists. And that's why science is so damn successful at the real world.
I interviewed Dr. William Glen, Historian of Science and Editor at Large of the Stanford University Press. In this video interview Dr. Glen discusses 'how science works in a crisis' and the how the scientific community finally converged on the continental drift theory. It's fascinating to learn how learning disabled science can be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7JNssOvy14&list=PL688CCE896D05286B
We have string theory accepted as fact with little or no data to support it.
I always love it when somebody whose pet theory of the day is rejected by science exclaims, "b.. b.. but other theories were rejected too." The implication being that their cockamamie pseudoscience is correct, but that they're just the "victim" of science too ... just like plate tectonics. The article makes no mention of the entire basis of Wegener's theory - that it was aerodynamics that pushed continents around - probably because it was pseudoscientific bullshit. An article showing how the scientific community rightly rejected an incorrect theory doesn't serve the same ends, does it?
My sister's science fair project in 1972 was on "continental drift" and she had to add "theory" to the title because several of the district science fair judges did not believe that it could possibly be true.
The arrogant phrasing of that statement is no different from anyone in the past who made similar statements. Anyone foolish enough to make a categorical statement about a theory (even one that the evidence suggests is true) is open to derision in the next century. Now, let's get back to global warming, global cooling, and the Mayan calendar.
The scientific method as I was taught...
observe a phenomenon
repeat
devise a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon
test the hypothesis
until( the hypothesis is proven )
adopt the proven hypothesis as theory
What sometimes happens...
observe a phenomenon
repeat
disregard or explain away the phenomenon
until( it just can't be ignored any more )
repeat
repeat
devise a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon
attack the credibility of the researcher who proposed the hypothesis
until( everyone fears even being associated with this field of study )
until( all the old guys have died off )
repeat
devise a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon
test the hypothesis
until( the hypothesis is proven )
adopt the proven hypothesis as theory
I took a geology course a decade ago, and my professor discussed the previous theories of geology. Geosynclines were part of the idea to explain what we geologically observe. I don't have too much of an understanding of it, but it amounted to saying that landslides and similar types of sediment transport were responsible for the underwater landscape. My professor said that even back then it didn't make too much sense.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Some suggestions were submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24, @03:17PM
- http://science.slashdot.org/submission/1993063/why-did-the-continental-drift-not-disalign-the-pyramids-in-africa
What's the favorite of /. folks, or are there better and more funny suggestions.
Volcanoes were invented shortly after World War 2, [. . .] they were then retroactively added to various historical documents around the world. . .
This wouldn't be the first time the past was revised in such a way. I present the non-obligatory non-XKCD link.
TC Chamberlin who oppose the concept of continental drift, previously opposed another hypothesis. This would be the age of earth put forth by Lord Kelvin who based his estimate on the time it would take a molten earth to cool down. Chamberlin, in opposition, wrote the following.
The fascinating impressiveness of rigorous mathematical analysis, with its atmosphere of precision and elegance, should not blind us to the defects of the premises that condition the whole process.
Kelvin's defect of the premises was that he did not include heat due to radioactive decay. And in a bit of irony, it is this heat that causes convection within the earth, which causes seafloor spreading/plate tectonics. So Chamberlin got one thing right, and one thing wrong.
All three of them...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
TFA describes a situation where someone put forth a hypothesis that a lot of people disagreed with, and for which people thought there was contrary evidence. And yet, the hypothesis was also supported (and inspired) by evidence, even though the evidence was disputed or the conclusion was thought to be outweighed by other evidence.
That doesn't sound anything like pseudoscience to me. That sounds like bad/wrong science, or thought-to-be-bad-but-vindicated science. Pseudoscience is a totally different thing, with almost nothing in common with this.
You can look back on continental drift and say it was right, or imagine a situation where people look back and said, "no, that turned out to be wrong; we later found the evidence of FSM's strandprints in shaping the continents, when we discovered the the lasagna layer laid down during the previously-unknown Parmesan Period of Mesozoic," but either way, it was science. That fact that the idea turned out to be very likely correct, is irrelevant to that.
Contrast this to something like intelligent design or pyramid crystal healing power, where if you ask people where they even got the idea or what led them to wonder about it, they either get evasive, or they say a bunch of incoherent stuff that no one will ever understand.
Imagine the hypothesis ever being refined in response to criticism. That's unthinkable with ID (because the very premise is that people magically knew the truth from holy books, so then they look for some way to fit the pre-known truth into all the conflicting data), yet it was clearly happening with continental drift (where the data led to the truth).
Continental drift was never pseudoscience. It was disputed, disbelieved, and not-widely-accepted science. A pseudoscience can't ever be merely disputed, disbelieved, or unaccepted. With pseudosciences, you can even get that far.
Phlogiston was once a widely accepted theory.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
...if I had some mod points.
Credo quia impossibilis -- Tertullian
Wegener knew the continents were moving, and collected a huge amount of evidence. Wegener didn't know why they were moving, but neither did anybody else. Wegener also failed to produce a cure for cancer and was hopeless at averting the Second World War. He did make the mistake of producing half-baked arguments for why the continents were moving, and getting his figures wrong on the rate of drift.
Geologists rejected his model because they decided to argue with Wegener, instead of continental drift. They proved Wegener was wrong and somehow thought that the whole problem of continental drift had gone away. They also applied special pleading, because they didn't know why the continents were rising (or they would have eroded away by now) or where the land bridges came from. According to the scientific method, they should have considered continental drift based on the evidence and the evidence should have been overwhelming. This is a classic example of human weakness in the face of a disruptive new idea.
pandering to corporate interests has been the rule since Regan. It's just that the teabaggers have realized that the bill is coming due while they are still alive, and that a black guy is trying to fir their problems. I don't know what upsets them more, that they may have to pay for the damage they've caused, or that an uppity minority is trying to tell them that.
Some suggestions were submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24, @03:17PM
- http://science.slashdot.org/submission/1993063/why-did-the-continental-drift-not-disalign-the-pyramids-in-africa
What's the favorite of /. folks, or are there better and more funny suggestions.
Probably b/c Continental drift is not what caused the continents to form. Rather, they were formed through the destruction of deep running aquifers that at the same time filled the oceans, destroyed the natural boundary between the tectonic plates (thus causing the perimeter to shrink, and the plates to grind together - this in turn creates the mountain ranges), and have since drifted from those locations. Thus continental drift is occurring, and platetectonics are occurring, but the the result of other things that occurred.
And yes, I'm pretty sure the evidence it there to support the above; though we may not have all of it yet and our scientists will likely be happy just pointing to contintal drift as what created the continents claiming it's happened for millinia so that's what made it, when in fact it may have been in a lot shorter timeline.
I was about to post a similar reference to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I saw the above post. This article just cries out for such a reference.
This author is currently in the process of documenting and highlighting another scientific revolution that is currently in progress, the scientific revolution surrounding Emergent Properties. For example, now that some scientists understand that complex phenomena can emerge from simple systems with simple rules, techniques have been devised that exploit this phenomenon to generate new technologies.
You should also remember that Galileo was trying to fit his scientific models to the biblical accounts of how things should be in order to appease his Christian overlords.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I always love how science is so sure that their current theories are the correct ones.
It's not like they have ever been wrong before?
shows bigots like you in a bad light does not mean that we should be your enablers.
One of the wisest comment here on /. at the time of discussing the Fukushima event was to remind us that at the time when the factory was built, the specifications for the "worst possible tsunami" were based on the previous century's recordings, and not on the Continental Drift theory, which (present) energy prediction indeed give "better" (and higher) waves.
When reading this last year I friended the author while there remained a slight doubt about the actual lack of knowledge for Wegener's theory in Japan in 1960.
Now I know it's real!
H.
Herve S.
You should also remember that Galileo was trying to fit his scientific models to the biblical accounts of how things should be in order to appease his Christian overlords.
He would have done a much better job of appeasing his Christian overlords had he simply not written those models in a way to make fun of them.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but you just related the exact explanation that the Creation Museum in Kentucky uses to explain the phenomenon. Was that intentional?
You should also remember that Galileo was trying to fit his scientific models to the biblical accounts of how things should be in order to appease his Christian overlords.
Oh, yes, of course -- that's why he insisted that tides only happened once per day to fit his heliocentric theory, even though everyone who lived near the coast clearly observed that it was not so. The Bible says so much about tides...
Oh, yes, of course -- that's why he insisted on perfect circles and other remnants of Aristotelean physics in his heliocentric model, while making fun of Kepler's elliptical model based on actual measurements... it wasn't because of his attempts to hold to ancient science or a refusal to consider empirical data -- it was because the Bible talks so much about circular orbits.
Oh, yes, of course -- that's why he volunteered not only to recant but to write additional chapters to his book disproving major parts of his heliocentric theory, but the Inquisition actually prevented him from embarrassing himself (thus saving his name for posterity)... obviously Galileo was obeying the Bible's tenets to recant and tell lies that you don't believe in... it couldn't have been because he had ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING EVIDENCE FOR HIS THEORY, which has fairly little in common with our modern heliocentric model, except for the fact that the sun is in the center....
Yeah, he was just trying to obey the Bible to satisfy his Christian overlords. /sarcasm
Read the fucking link.
Galileo was an ass, or god-tier troll. Not sure which. Like most, he had a few genius ideas, and a lot of horse shit.