When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience 214
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.'"
Ambiguous references to persons (Score:4, Funny)
"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.
Even in the 1960's There was Doubt (Score:4, Informative)
I took a geology course a decade ago, and my professor discussed the previous theories of geology. Geosynclines [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Ambiguous references to persons (Score:5, Informative)
And just changing the period to a comma would actually increase the ambiguity from a "I wonder if" to an "aaaugh" level, dude.
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I agree it's pretty awkward, but I don't understand how you can be confused as to whether Conniff was the submitter's professor. AC's point about the period was that it makes it obvious he is talking about two different people. There's no ambiguity, just poor writing.
I don't know where you are getting the idea that it "jumps back and forth" between Conniff and the professor, either. Conniff is mentioned only in the beginning. Do you mean because after talking about the professor the submitter quotes the art
Re:Ambiguous references to persons (Score:5, Funny)
That was a period after Connif, not a comma
And a geological period at that.
theories (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:theories (Score:4, Interesting)
So the OP's professor was in grad school circa-1912?
No, there are two theories spoken of here -- the original idea of continental drift a century ago (which showed up without much of an explanation, hence viewed by some as pseudoscience), and the more modern theories about plate tectonics and seafloor spreading, which serve to validate and explain continental drift. The latter were evidently emerging when the prof was in grad school.
Re:theories (Score:5, Interesting)
The theory of plate tectonics was developed in the 1950s and 1960s [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org]). 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.
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Are you qualified to say why this is wrong?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfBSc6e7QQ [youtube.com]
Re:theories (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't actually believe this? There are so many problems with this idea. Where did the extra mass come from? Where did the water come from? If you look at the animation you can see that the continents are actually morphed in all possible ways to fit with the preconceived model. Of course it fits if you just morph it any way you like. There is science and then there is just crap like this with nothing to back it up.
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I don't believe any of it. I think this is a novel theory, though, and provocative.
I have no idea where the theoretical extra mass comes from, but I wouldn't think it unreasonable that the Earth is gaining mass from the Sun. Although, it wouldn't really even need to have extra mass if the earth was just less dense. Not unreasonable to suppose the Sun causes that sort of effect either...
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A vaguely related question that nags at me whenever the talk goes geological, is this:
I was taught that the eastern Canada and New England were probably slowly rising in a rebound effect after the weight of the last Ice Age glaciers was removed. And that the southern part of the eastern seaboard was slowly sinking due to a concomitant seesaw effect.
Whether that is true or not, it does have me wondering what the increase in sea level may be doing to plate tectonics. Is the weight of this increase enough
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Re:theories (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I had been too lazy to do the math. But I now feel shamed into it.
The Earth's ocean surface area: 335,258,000 sq km (from worldatlas.com [worldatlas.com])
A conservative estimate of the amount of sea level rise from AGW over the next 75 years, give or take, seems to be around 10 cm.
Volume needed to raise the ocean surface area by 10 cm: 3.35*10^13 cu m
Weight of 1 cubic meter of water: 282.5 lb (Pardon the change from metric to english, but I am more comfortable with the measures I learned as a kid. Especially as I want to talk about weight and not mass.)
Weight of the increased water: 9.5*10^15 lb, or 4.7*10^12 tons.
That seems like an awful lot of weight to take off of Antarctica and Greenland. If the continents are actually floating on the mantle, then these two would become more bouyant as all that ice melts away.
So the question for geologists is to what extent would the rise of Antarctica and Greenland affect the plate tectonics? Bearing in mind that this weight has been transferred to the ocean floors at roughly 14,000 tons per sq km?
(It would not hurt my feelings if someone would check my math.)
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"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."
[Shrug] So? If you want to find stuff in the Earth, then you hire a geologist. Where do you think the silicon in the chips, the gold in the connectors, the indium in your lcd display, and the plastic in your computer comes from? To find things in the Earth that people need, geologists develop theories to better understand how the Earth works, and how natural
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Grad school prof.. maybe? I dunno. I remember in public school ~2000 I had a teacher was adamant that continental drift was an impossible pseudoscience. Spent a whole day's lesson explaining its flaws. The bizarre thing was he was supposed to be teaching U.S. history from the revolution to the modern day.
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Grad school prof.. maybe? I dunno. I remember in public school ~2000 I had a teacher was adamant that continental drift was an impossible pseudoscience. Spent a whole day's lesson explaining its flaws. The bizarre thing was he was supposed to be teaching U.S. history from the revolution to the modern day.
Bizzare drift frightens Continentals. Silversmith Paul Revere rides warning Red Hot Coats drifting this way.
Did he have a lesson plan for that?
Did this happen in PS2000? Is he in one of New York's celebrated Rubber Rooms?
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No, a Pennsylvanian school with a habit of promoting looking for good coaches and giving them teacher positions to save money. This guy was softball. The football/chemistry showed "Remember the Titans" weekly after he got tired of doing chemistry labs. Not that the other chemistry teacher was much better. Replace "Remember the Titans" with self-written poetry readings. There were a few more, but that is not here or there.
Re:theories (Score:5, Funny)
Not that the other chemistry teacher was much better. Replace "Remember the Titans" with self-written poetry readings.
OMG. You got a Vogon chemistry teacher. My hearty congratulations and deeply-felt respect on surviving that captivity.
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No, a Pennsylvanian school with a habit of promoting looking for good coaches and giving them teacher positions to save money. This guy was softball. The football/chemistry showed "Remember the Titans" weekly after he got tired of doing chemistry labs. Not that the other chemistry teacher was much better. Replace "Remember the Titans" with self-written poetry readings. There were a few more, but that is not here or there.
What is it that uh (he pretended to fumble for the word) qualifies you said one student in the coach's English class.
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So the OP's professor was in grad school circa-1912?
No. Pretty much the whole point of TFA is that it took a half-century for Wegener to be vindicated. Continental drift theory was not generally accepted until the 1960s, and I remember that in the 70s there was still considerable debate about whether or not it really explained the modern shape and placement of the continents. It's not at all surprising that he ran into someone who still dismissed the whole idea as nonsense if he was in grad school in, say, the mid-60s -- or even up to the 80s, if the pro
Re:theories (Score:5, Informative)
Oversimplified article: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Science is a process, not the fact.
Real Scientist will follow the Scientific method, and based on the method it will either prove or disprove their hypothesis. For continental drift. You are going on the fact the contents would roughly fit together like a puzzle, so perhaps they were at one time put together. That is all fine and good, you now have model to base your hypothesis on. Now other then just a though experiment, you need to go to the next steps and try to prove your theory. If you are unable
Re:Oversimplified article: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Excellent summary of the usual excuse for why leading geologist snubbed Wegeners theory. But there are several problems in this excuse; first of all, while Wegener didn't have a mechanism for explaining /how/ continental drift worked, neither did his opponents when it came to explain their opposing theories! They had to invent suddenly raising land-bridges that spanned 1000 of kilometres between all the continents to explain away the identical fossil records, land-bridges that appeared and disappeared without any trace or explanation, or without any known mechanism to cause them. The "anti-Wegeners" had even more severe problems than the "continental drifters" when it came to "mechanisms" explaining the data. /identical/ rocks didn't come from the same source. Wegeners idea wasn't armchair speculation, he had lots of hard data from many different sources, data that had baffled scientist before.
Wegeners theory could explain a lot of observed geological and biological data at the same time, while the "anti-Wegeners" had to invent many different theories to explain the same data, many without any explaining mechanisms or any physical evidence like the land-bridge network between all continents, or hot water streams that conveniently appeared when it came to explain why temperate fossils appeared in Arctic regions, or why
Newton didn't have any "mechanism" or explanation on what gravity was or what caused it in his "Principia..."; he only described its effect, yet his work was widely accepted. Darwin didn't have any mechanism explaining why beneficial traits to be inherited by the offspring, since DNA wasn't known, yet his work was widely accepted because it explained the observed data so well.
I think a much better explanation of why continental drift was suppressed with quite some vigour, is Not-Invented-Here syndrome, group-think, and conservative and stagnant leading scientists suppressing new theories, rather than any sensible scientific process.
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Of course they were real physical objections. They were based on models that were wrong, but were the ones available at the time. To say that it's not a physical objection is to demand clairvoyance.
Wegener himself knew that he didn't have a fully valid dynamics for how the continents could move. He knew that it was a very reasonable seeming explanation for his observations and proposed some initial models. There are many things that are reasonable to the point of being obvious that are nonetheless wrong.
Yo
Because Wegener's original theory was wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Science should never be dogmatic (Score:2)
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That happens all the time. Remember Einstein's resistance against quantum physics, even though his paper on the photoelectric effect was what started it.
Scientific revolutions don't happen by convincing people but when the old guard dies.
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I don't think that's all that correct either. Plenty of naturalists that objected initially to Darwin were won over in his own lifetime, and most certainly while Einstein objected to QM, some of his own peers accepted it in due course. The "old guard" is not some homogeneous band of group thinkers, but is as diverse in view as the new guard is. Even Einstein himself modified some of his views, calling the cosmological constant that he had inserted into GR "the biggest mistake" of his career (of course, the
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Of course. But there is always a core of older scientists who don't get it, which keeps any new theory from being universally accepted until those folks die. In the meantime the nonscientific folks say "See, it's controversial!" or worse.
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I don't buy it. Give me an example, because the one's provided so far; Einstein's objections to QM and Victorian naturalists objections to Natural Selection, don't prove your point at all, quite the opposite, they indicate that scientists, when presented with a good theory, will give it due consideration. Einstein may have had his objections to QM, but even his own peers were giving away to it, because it explained observations very well.
If what you said was true, theories would come in fits, only when the
Pseudoscience? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I wish I could mod this up to +6: insightful
The scientific method is based on the idea that you create theories, present them to the world who tear the theory apart and examine it, then create better theories if they can. Putting forward a new theory that gets challenged, argued over and torn apart is not pseudoscience.
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The scientific method is based on the idea that you create theories, present them to the world who tear the theory apart and examine it, then create better theories if they can. Putting forward a new theory that gets challenged, argued over and torn apart is not pseudoscience.
I agree entirely. I think even among people who like science, there's a lack of appreciation for the philosophy of science and the value of wrongness. In fact, even in the scientific community, we don't dedicate enough effort to assuming hypotheses might be wrong. Confirmation bias is a harsh mistress and we don't do enough to fight her.
Wegener was right and wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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.
predictive modeling and pseudoscience (Score:2, Insightful)
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whilst global warming has spawned an "industry"
...which is in direct competition with the fossil fuels industry for the same dollars.
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Citation needed. That is 7% of Italy's GDP, and seems an awfully high number.
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Don't mix politics with science.
Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) is a scientific theory, that has been shown to be quite correct over last number of decades.
Carbon taxes, crap and trade, green subsidies, etc. are ALL political inventions about how to *fix*, which generally involve funneling money into their pork spending projects.
Personally, I believe revenue neutral carbon taxes are the only way to go. Subsidies for specific "green" industries are just a plan for an economic boondoggle of historic prop
A point of caution (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The ulcers story is in fact another example where the outsiders with the radical new theory really weren't. There was a Skeptical Inquirer article which fortunately was on the web.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_the_making_of_a_myth/ [csicop.org]
Summary:
-- research studies take time. Given this, scientists accepted the theory reasonably fast.
-- the scientist who tested the theory on himself didn't develop an ulcer.
-- existing non-antibiotic treatments did work, though they wer
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Well this gives me hope that my theory will be accepted in my lifetime. I can't yet prove that zombies are visitors from our own future or that they evolved due to excessive use of facebook, twitter and cell phones. I'm getting pressure from certain manufacturers and service providers who conspire to dumb down the masses. I hope to survive the threats and innuendo long enough to see acceptance of my theory and a revival of good healthy Old Time Radio.
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"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan
Expanding Earth Theory (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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I remember (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
scientific method (Score:2)
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
Chamberlin and Kelvin (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Funny)
economic warp speed
? sounds like a new function describing our national debt.
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Informative)
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.
If that's the case Gallileo shouldn't get credit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 [heracliteanriver.com]
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"
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Kind of like you are doing now...
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;)
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You are a fool. You mistake not understanding how things work for not knowing that they work.
You are the same kind of person that would have thrown Galilleo into jail for not explaining how things work.
Science is NOT about showing how something works first, then detecting it. Instead, real science is about DETECTING SOMETHING, proving that it is REAL, then figuring out how it works.
We looked at the earth, found clear evidence in multiple forms - similar plants, animals, land shapes, fossil records, etc.
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Science is NOT about showing how something works first, then detecting it.
Sometimes it is (that is, predicting it exists first). Look at the search for the Higgs, for example.
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they fly using the same principles of a helicopter
So they don't fly then? i.e. helicopters don't fly, they just beat the air into submission ;-)
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Because it can't work. Because we can't go faster than the speed of sound? Because it can't be true that we orbit the sun? Those sound like someone closing the book and dismissing a possibility before determining whether or not it can be done. Any scientist I would consider worth their salt would say instead "We have not yet found evidence to believe that such a process exists" or something similar. It's similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light, AND YET, someone's hypothesizing su
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So no, "because it can't work" isn't a valid way to disprove a scientific claim.
LOL. So here's a steel cable with a one inch cross section and a 10kpsi tensile strength. Hang a 11k pound weight and my calculations show it'll snap. You can live in the world of mathematics and testable, disprovable scientific hypothesis, or you can dream about pleasant things and what if.
It's similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light
Not at all. Its similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light with a roll of duct tape, a model rocket engine, and a case of beer. The numbers show that yes indeed that will not work. All the
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In a pre-atomic era, there seems to be no rational way to avoid a frozen solid earth. Frozen solid = no movement.
wtf? Didn't they have volcanos back then?
I am old enough to remember when "the jury was still out" on continental drift. What convinced me as a teenager was that the S America and Africa coastlines match pretty accurately, even down to the kinds of rock. Claiming Wegener was just lucky just demonstrates your own ignorance as to how he assessed the evidence.
So, what's the story on Intelligent D
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Funny)
Volcanoes were invented shortly after World War 2, following the demonstration by the crew of the Manhattan Project that it was possible to melt rock. They were so impressive that they were then retroactively added to various historical documents around the world, thru a combination of warp drive and continental drift.
Proof by analogy (Score:3)
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 [multifamilyinvestor.com].
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What convinced me as a teenager was that the S America and Africa coastlines match pretty accurately, even down to the kinds of rock.
And this is what surprises me about the whole thing. Until this article, I didn't realize that there had ever really been any controversy on this subject, (or at least none since the first published map of the world.) Even as a child in elementary school I had a map on my wall and the coast lines of not just South America and Africa, but many other places as well just seemed to mesh too well to be coincidence. Before anyone had told me about continental drift I had always assumed it to be the case just base
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There is no ID model. You're just dressing up catastrophism in fancy new clothes, making odd claims about C14 (which is absolutely no use in questions around tectonic plates and continent drift).
Where do people like you come from. I mean, what you've written above is so absurd, it's not even wrong.
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According to the ID model
The ID model? What model? ID is just: "Whatever science finds, except the root cause is God wants it to be like that." Hardly a proper model, just piggybacking.
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So like many things, the reality is somewhere between the two
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Interesting)
The tectonic view is far more predictive of a wide range of phenomena, including gravity anomalies under mountain ranges, zones of vulcanism (e.g. the "ring of fire" around the pacific) and so on. Wegener's role in modern geology is somewhat similar to Lorentz' role in the development of relativity. The Lorentz contraction is an effect, but Lorentz was unable to place it within a theoretical framework which unified many other observations. Wegener did not unify the action of the mantle with the action of crust correctly. Lack of a mechanism does not stop us from studying, for example, Kepler or Newton. Newton offers no mechanism for gravitation, and Kepler no mechanism for his orbital dynamics.
Wegener died relatively young, in an attempt to save others in the arctic, and had the misfortune of being too far ahead of the available observations. He was, on a key point, simply wrong about basalt dynamics.
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He was, of course, making irrational stuff up, that accidentally happened to turn out to be correct.
Yep, he was totally making up the sea-shells found atop the highest mountains, and of course volcano's weren't invented a 100yrs ago.
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Insightful)
Making an observation that something appears to have happened, but failing to explain the mechanism for is not "making irrational stuff up". It's "presenting an hypothesis", which is part of the scientific method. It's an entirely different thing from imagining something fanciful out of nothing factual because you want it for a work of fiction. It's perfectly rational to say "we can't fathom why or how yet, but let's see if this might be true". For example, Newton didn't have any real explanation for what makes gravity work (nor did anyone else, for centuries), but his formulas describing his observations of orbital mechanics were genuine science being practiced, not "making irrational stuff up".
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failing to explain the mechanism for is not "making irrational stuff up". It's "presenting an hypothesis"
Ahhh but he was not "failing to explain" as in the dog ate his homework or he hadn't gotten to it yet, he was "failing" as in if the earth's innards were hot enough without atomic decay heat to recently float the continents, then X million years ago it must have been hotter because that heat is obviously radiating away. Liquid rock is Really Hot.
His theory was absolute nonsense for the physics of the time. Do some simple thermodynamics math and if the continents were floating recently, this implies certai
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Actually, it could be posited that Star Trek inspired many to go in to the space business, and thus, should warp travel be achieved, could deserve partial credit for helping to create the time stream that led there.
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In a pre-atomic era, there seems to be no rational way to avoid a frozen solid earth. Frozen solid = no movement.
Wouldn't hundreds of active volcanoes all over the Earth, spewing out liquid lava, be a pretty good counter-argument to the "frozen solid" theory?
I understand that people back then didn't understand why the interior of the Earth was molten, but it should have been pretty obvious that is was.
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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.
"Making stuff up" is an educated guess, or hypothesis. You can keep dividing matter into smaller and smaller pieces. Is that infinite or not? Saying "there must be atomic particles" is as educated a guess as "matter may be divided infinitesimally" if you know as much as the ancient Greeks. The same exists with continental drift. Look at a map and see that the continents kind of fit together like puzzles. Also note that sometime the earth shakes and bleeds (volcano's). So even without all the data and knowle
Re:Heat and movement (Score:5, Insightful)
If real, usable, economic warp speed spacecraft propulsion is ever invented, that doesn't mean the "star trek" writers should get credit.
Actually, it just might. That's how we got self-opening doors. When TOS came out and Disney was planning EPCOT, they saw Star Trek and their "imagineers" went to Paramount to find out how they accomplished it. They were discouraged when told that the "self operating" doors were opened and closed by stagehands, by hand. Less than ten years later they were on almost every grocery store.
I'd say that if someone came up with a way to warp spce, Star Trek should get some credit.
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Actually, it just might. That's how we got self-opening doors. When TOS came out and Disney was planning EPCOT, they saw Star Trek and their "imagineers" went to Paramount to find out how they accomplished it
The first automatic door in the US was installed at a busy entrance to MIT in 1931. By 1940, automatic doors powered by GE's "Magic Eye" device could be found in factories, warehouses, and restaurants all over the country.
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...If real, usable, economic warp speed spacecraft propulsion is ever invented, that doesn't mean the "star trek" writers should get credit...
Although I agree that making up shit that happens to be correct (the stopped clock analogy) isn't worth of credit. Perhaps you are taking the analogy too far. I wouldn't hesitate to give Star Trek writers some credit for the cell phone (Martin Cooper of Motorola has stated that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him to develop the handheld mobile phone), so it's not too much of a stretch on the warp drive.
As a prelude to how this might credit chain migh
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Why did scientists go down that road? An old and decidedly not funny joke is helpful:
Three scientists were walking near the lab where they worked during lunch one day.
One pointed to an animal on a nearby hillside and said, "Gee, I didn't know there were black sheep around here."
The second said, "Don't jump to conclusions -- all you've seen is ONE black sheep, so you don't know if there are others."
The third said, "Don't jump to conclusions about that one sheep. So far, all you've seen is one side of one s
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Newton, in his quest to "learn more about our Creator", came to the conclusion that we must assume other stars out there have their own systems of planets in orbit. That was the 18th century, and it has been the pervasive theory since then.
I do remember there being a lot of discussion about "Planet X" [wikipedia.org], when I was young, though. It was stated to be a large planet, beyond the reaches of Pluto, capable of sustaining life, and harboring aliens. Of course, this is just one of the craziest of the many theories
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I seem to recall much debate regarding the the very existence of exoplanets.
I don't, and I'm seventy years old. Do you have a citation for that?
In the Fifties there were a number of claimed detections of exoplanets, and those met with entirely valid rejection because the means of detection weren't up to it. The astrophysics community wasn't saying "There's nothing there" -- it was saying "You haven't demonstrated a statistically valid pattern in all that noise."
And in reverse (Score:4, Interesting)
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Which string theory is considered a fact and by who?
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Really? Where? Even string theorists will admit, when pushed to do so, that they do not yet possess a testable theory, and the wider physics community has never particularly embraced it, considering it an interesting hypothesis that may not have a damned thing to do with reality.
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We have string theory accepted as fact...
Only on television, that that's mostly Brian Greene's fault.
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So was Einstein's and Copernicus theories.
Einstein's work was never considered pseudoscience by those knowledgeable in the field. I really wish people would stop repeating this myth. Relativity theory was groundbreaking, to be sure, but both special and general relativity were widely accepted within a few years of publication because they so neatly solved so many problems which had been bugging so many physicists. It seems we're so wedded to the story of "great scientist mocked by his peers but vindicated by history" that we tell that story abou
Re:So was every other theory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget that Einstein's work didn't come out of thin air, but was based on previous work like Lorentz and Maxwell. We have mythologized Einstein to some extent, just as we did with Newton and Galileo, tending to forget that these men, while instrumental in scientific advancement, built upon previous work.
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I find it incredible that people will swallow ideas like there's a big sky daddy who will answer prayers but won't accept ideas that are based on careful work and lots of documented evidence.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle [wikipedia.org]
It's happened not once, but several times. You're right, it would be highly unlikely that all the continents were lumped together one and only one time, and then assumed their current fairly scatted forms. Instead, they keep merging together and then breaking apart.
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Part of the problem is that the "Gaia hypothesis" is misnamed; it's not a single hypothesis to be tested. Obviously there exist regulatory feedback cycles within the environment; the question is how strong those feedback cycles are. If you want to think of the entire planet as a single self-regulating organism, you certainly can, but it really doesn't change the nature of the investigation into how specific parts of it work.
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All three of them...
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A theory has to have more substance than "somewhere somehow something is wrong with evolution." The only positive claim (if you can call it that) to come out of ID was Dembski's information filter, which was demonstrated to be mathematical fluff years ago.
Re:Good Try (Score:4, Informative)
Carl Sagan said it best: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."