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Alfred Wagner proposed the idea of plate tectonics decades before citing the fit of the continents, the same species found of plants and animals found continents separated by ocean, and glacial striations as evidence. The problem was that know one knew HOW the plates separated.
He actually described the continents as scraping across an ancient and immobile seafloor. This was deemed mechanically implausible and contributed greatly to the rejection of Continental Drift. If Al stuck with his detailed phenomenological approach, there may have been wider adoption of his detailed and careful observations.
Source?
Well, am geophysicist for 20+ years, and I teach this stuff, but the best source I remember reading is “The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science” by Naomi Oreskes.
Roughly how often do you get enraged when you hear about people talking about parts of the world with certain energies?
Plates that move? Psh, Id rather propose that a whole continent called Lemuria just vanished.
Plants do move. Have you never seen a dandelion blowing in the wind or an acorn fall from a tree.
It also took a climatologist or something and nobody believed him. Probably because a lot of science stubbornly gravitated around religious stupidity of some kind.
bro, you dont need to post screenshots of twitter. just steal the post, no one cares.
I remember the day I realized that Africa and South America fit together when looking at a paper atlas. It felt like I had just discovered something incredible. I guess I had, but I wasn’t the first. :-)
I’m really bothered by this line of thinking.
Just because something “looks” like it is a certain way doesn’t mean it is. For anything to be considered fact there needs to be evidence. The hypothesis that the Earth may have plate tectonics existed decades before it became fact.
This leads people to make connections between completely unrelated things, despite scientists, or professionals working in fields of science (i.e. doctors), saying, and often proving, there is none.
Sure we are pattern matching machines. We had to be the humans that couldn’t figure out “big scary noise usually means big scary threat” died off.
My hat goes off to all the great minds in the sciences that can not only overcome this tendency but using it AT THE SAME TIME!
Consider eprime, english without “is”
“Garfield is a cat”: “Garfield belongs to the cat species”.
They had me until this one lmao
This is a story I am going to repeat forever.
When I was taking one of my science classes for my major our professor mentioned that she is pretty convinced that she was the last holdout geologist for this theory. So not only had this been discovered in recent history it was controversial in recent history.
Continental drift had been proposed way before this. The mechanism was unknown.
