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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.'"
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.
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.
economic warp speed
? sounds like a new function describing our national debt.
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.
You were aware that he actually had a fair amount of evidence for continental drift, right? Including fossils (particularly plant fossils) and geography on both sides of the continents that had drifted apart? The fact that he didn't have a mechanism doesn't make it irrational.
He didn't "just happen" to be right, he was a serious scientist who correctly observed evidence for geological change, and correctly supposed that slow gradual movement of landmasses over time was indicated.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
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.
The theory of plate tectonics was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, as people worked through the implications of the older idea of continental drift and worked out mechanisms for it, and as things like sonar mapping of the seafloor came into being.
My father is a geographer and was in grad school from 1966 to 1971, and he's talked about the fighting over plate tectonics going on among the geologists and physical geographers at his university. At the end of his time in grad school there were a few older geologists who adamantly refused to buy into the idea. Most people in the profession were convinced very quickly of the reality of plate tectonics, once there were good tests of the theory (like the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis). But the "anti-drifter" stance was only killed off by attrition, as the people opposed to it either retired or else died with their boots on.
It's a pretty interesting example of the emergence of a major new idea that completely reshapes a field of knowledge, and does so very quickly once a good explanatory mechanism is found. There's probably a good book-length study of it, and if there isn't then there should be.