…every seven-year-old looking at a globe has noticed the same jigsaw puzzle, but remarkably until the 1960s, scientists did not find that compelling. No one looked and said, “Hmm, that’s odd.”
h/t A Ziggen
…every seven-year-old looking at a globe has noticed the same jigsaw puzzle, but remarkably until the 1960s, scientists did not find that compelling. No one looked and said, “Hmm, that’s odd.”
h/t A Ziggen
American geologists were particularly slow to accept continental drift. In part this was a reaction to Wegener, who has European and whose book did not, to be honest, meet high scientific standards.
But this does not explain nor excuse the fact that continental drift was not generally accepted by American geologists until the 1960s.
A bit of supplement to rabbit’s comment —
// Imagine my surprise —and dismay—to discover in England that the radically new idea of plate tectonics had been proposed more than half a century before by a German geophysicist, Alfred Wegener, and widely promoted in the United Kingdom by the leading British geologist of his era, Arthur Holmes. The revolution that had been described by my professors in the United States as the radical revelation of a dramatically new vision of the earth was viewed by many of my professors in England as the pleasing confirmation of a long-suspected notion. […]
It was evident that the recent history of earth science was much more complex, much more nationalistic, and much more interesting than my professors and textbooks —or my readings in the philosophy of science—had ever suggested. //
Naomi Oreskes The Rejection of CONTINENTAL DRIFT: Theory and Method in American Earth Science
Oreskes has also written
Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth
AND
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
From the USGS website….
…this notion [continental drift] was first suggested as early as 1596 by the Dutch map maker Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus. Ortelius suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa . . . by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”
Wegener’s idea was rejected by science because he offered no cause for the drift. It wasn’t until the mid-Atlantic ridge was discovered (by submarines) that geologists could no longer ignore Wegener’s ideas.
And in typical dogmatic fashion geologists confirmed continental drift was incorrect for it was “plate tectonics” that caused the continents to move. Gotta love those hair splitters.
It is unlikely that anyone prior to Ortelius would have noticed the Earth’s continents fit together like a puzzle because accurate enough maps of the world would not have been available.
Also, technically, submarines did not discover the mid-Atlantic ridge but rather the people within them did. For the pedantic.
At the start of the 20th century Canadian geologists believed the Richardson Mountains were pushed up and created by the weight of the MacKenzie River’s alluvial deposits.
It all fits into one complete crust on a much smaller colder planet before the sun lit up. Figured that out when I was nine.
// It all fits into one complete crust on a much smaller colder planet before the sun lit up. Figured that out when I was nine. //
Pretty good for a nine-year-old.
That’s the “expanding earth” hypothesis, as distinct from the “shrinking earth” hypothesis, both distinct from modern science.
But there are adults who still hold to it:
The Expanding Earth hypothesis, first proposed by Robert Mantovani in 1889, attempts to explain continental drift, but without the actual continental drift.
This hypothesis was actually considered not unreasonable before the acceptance of plate tectonics, and there are still a small number of older respectable geologists who hold it plausible. It defied physics, but the geologists had been right and physics and chemistry wrong in the 19th century regarding the age of the Earth, and the geologists still had a great big smug on. These days, though, it’s cranks all the way down.
[…]
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Expanding_Earth
“There is much more
evidenceemotion to support human-caused climate change than there ever was for the now-discredited theory on how the continents were formed.”So… this one’s really gonna hurt.
The writer missed out the Canadian geophysicist Lawrence Morley, who was the one that noticed the magnetic “stripes” on the Atlantic ocean floor, which showed what the drift mechanism was like.
I’m still not completely sold on the theory that the Canadian Shield is an ancient eroded mountain range.
I’ve never been sold on the theory that the Canadian Shield is an ancient eroded mountain range.
Sorry bout that. Captcha got me.
The state of opinion in the early/mid 1950s was captured in Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”, where the fit is presented as an amusing coincidence not to be taken seriously. I have read that it was only when the continents taken from the outer edges of the continental shelves were used, that the fit became convincingly better.
and god created the world and all that there is in it in 6 days and rested on the 7th!!!!
There is ample evidence that Kuhn is wrong about science changing as a result of paradigm shifts. What really happens is that the older scientists never give up on their wrong theories; they’re just replaced by younger scientists who grew up proposing and accepting the new theories.
They’re called “paradigm shifts” because they’re worth about five cents each…