🚀 go-pugleaf

In <93e1VB1w165w@dorsai.com> shire@dorsai.com (Kenneth Shire) writes:

>Sad indeed!  Though I am not by profession a physical scientist, it seems 
>that the it was not simply that the observational evidence didn't jibe 
>with Wegener's theory that did it in.

...

>  My point is that I believe it 
>was the *apparent* impossiblity of continental land masses moving *at 
>all* that did in Wegener's theory.  That, coupled fatally with his lack 
>of academic credentials in geology, of course.  In other words, it was an 
>inability to "see" coupled to a very unscientific prejudice that 
>called for not any-old but a specific university degree for a man's 
>theory to be taken seriously when it seemed to fly so thoroughly in the 
>face of both common sense and the common "wisdom" of the academics who 
>control what is "true" at any one time within essentially academic 
>communities of thought.  


But when evidence of sea-floor spreading starting appearing,
continental drift caught on pretty quickly. Wegener's ideas were
rejected at first because he had no evidence for a mechanism, not
because he didn't have the right credentials. If he had been able
to present direct measurements of spreading rates, or data on the
symmetry and age of magnetic reversals on either sides of spreading
centers his ideas would have been accepted quickly. Indeed, such data
are so compelling that the idea is an obvious conclusion.

Recall that Einstein was 
working as a patent clerk when he published special relativity, 
a far more revolutionary idea than continental drift which
nevertheless quickly won wide acceptance. What of all those
academics controlling what was thought true at the time in physics? 
Maybe they exist only in geology.