Scientific Feuds E-Book

Joel Levy

• Herausgeber: IMM Lifestyle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 285

Beschreibung

Most science chronicles present a triumphant march through time, with revolutionary thinkers and their discoveries following in orderly progression. The truth, however, is somewhat different. Scientific Feuds is a collection of the most vicious battles among the greatest minds of our time. It features such contests as Huxley and Wilberforce's debate on Darwin's theory of evolution, Franklin and Wilkins' fight over the discovery of DNA, and the "War of Currents" between Tesla and Edison (which ended with Edison electrocuting dogs and horses in a vain attempt to discredit Tesla's work). From passionate competition to vindictive sniping, these rivalries prove that the world of science is far from cold and methodical.

Leseprobe

For Matt, Aisling and Sam

Published in 2010 by New Holland Publishers (UK) LtdLondon • Cape Town • Sydney • Aucklandwww.newhollandpublishers.com

Garfield House, 86–88 Edgware Road, London W2 2EA, United Kingdom80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South AfricaUnit 1, 66 Gibbes Street, Chatswood, NSW 2067, Australia218 Lake Road, Northcote, Auckland, New Zealand

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2010 in text: Joel LevyCopyright © 2010 in artworks: New Holland Publishers (UK) LtdCopyright © 2010 in photographs: see page 224Copyright © 2010 New Holland Publishers (UK) LtdJoel Levy has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 84773 514 0Paperback ISBN 978 1 84773 717 5eISBN 978 1 60765 247 2

Senior Editor: Kate ParkerEditorial Direction: Rosemary WilkinsonPublisher: Aruna VasudevanDesign and cover design: David EtheringtonIllustrator: Alan MarshallProduction: Melanie Dowland

Reproduction by Pica Digital PTE Ltd, SingaporePrinted and bound by Tien Wah Press, Singapore

Fight the power. Italian fresco of the 13th century showing Galen and Hippocrates, the fathers of medicine. For over a millennium their authority on matters medical was unchallenged, but in the 16th and 17th centuries a few brave individuals triggered controversy – and bitter feuding – by daring to point out their mistakes.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Earth Sciences

Kelvin vs Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, et al.

Wegener vs Jeffreys, et al.

Williams vs Chouet

Part Two: Evolution and Palaeobiology

Huxley vs Wilberforce

Cope vs Marsh

Leakey vs Johanson

Kettlewell vs Hooper and Wells

Fiedel vs Dillehay

Smit vs Keller

Jacob vs Brown, Morwood, Roberts, et al.

Part Three: Biology and Medicine

Harvey vs Primrose and Riolan

Pasteur vs Pouchet

Faulds vs Galton and Herschel

Freud vs Adler

Freud vs Jung

Sabin vs Salk

Franklin vs Wilkins

Montagnier vs Gallo

Venter vs the Human Genome Project

Part Four: Physics, Astronomy and Maths

Tycho vs Ursus

Galileo vs Pope Urban

Newton vs Flamsteed

Newton vs Leibniz

Wallace vs Hampden

Tesla vs Edison

Hoyle vs Ryle

Glossary

References

Index

Acknowledgements

FEATURES

Paleoanthropology: The Most Contentious Science

Fraud in Science

Science and Experimental Evidence

Science and the Media

Science and Politics

Science and the Church

Wagers in Science

Fringe Science

INTRODUCTION

The history of science is boring; the traditional version, that is, with its stately progression of breakthroughs and discoveries, inspirational geniuses and the long march out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge. This is the story as it is often presented in museums, textbooks and classrooms; but it is an invention, a typically Victorian piece of bowdlerized mythmaking. The real history of science is far messier, more nuanced and complex, and much, much dirtier. This was true of the earliest scientists, and it is still true today. According to Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, speaking in 1999: ‘You’d think that scientists would have a degree of saintliness that would be almost unbearable. It doesn’t work that way. The competition goes on at all levels – the international, the national, the institutional, and finally the guy across the hall.’

The ancients, too, knew that conflict was inevitable in science. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, in his 4th-century BCE work, The Law, wrote that, ‘There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance’, while according to Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, ‘This only is certain, that there is nothing certain; and nothing more miserable and yet more arrogant than man.’

This book surveys more than 25 feuds from the history of science and technology, from the very beginnings of science in the Early Modern Period (roughly 1500–1750) to recent feuds in areas such as genomics and human evolution. Some feuds were little more than cordial disagreements over points of theory but many were vicious and prolonged, and some, all-consuming. The stakes were often great – eternal glory, Nobel prizes, untold wealth, personal ruin, even life itself – and the details often unedifying. Collateral damage ranged from blighted careers to electrocuted elephants. The range and variety of the feuds makes it hard to generalize, but each story is revealing in its own way: about key scientific debates, but also about how science works.

Face off. An engraving after Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s 1847 painting, Galileo Before the Inquisition. Galileo’s scientific ideas were attacked by many, but it was only when he inadvertently triggered a feud with his former patron Maffeo Barberini, aka Pope Urban VIII, that he found himself on trial for his life.

The feudal system

Science was characterized by feuding from the very beginning. Its roots were in alchemy and magic, and while some alchemists and magi collaborated, in the main they toiled in isolation, guarding their secrets, denigrating the efforts of others and hoping that they alone would be the first to achieve the ultimate prize – the Philosopher’s Stone, transmutation of lead into gold, the Elixir of Life, the restitution of ancient wisdom. As natural philosophy took its first steps towards the scientific world view with the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, relations between the great men of the day were as often defined by fear and loathing as respect and admiration. Johannes Kepler served as an assistant to the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, but the two fell out at least once in the short time they knew each other, while Tycho also carried on a bitter feud with rival astronomer Ursus (seepages 164–165) and was cordially despised by Galileo.

Matters did not improve when the baton of natural philosophy passed to England in the late 17th century, where Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, was also perhaps the most argumentative. Even his famous phrase, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’, which appears to encapsulate everything that is humble, noble and gracious about science, may have been little more than a dig at a short-statured enemy (seepages 180–181). Why is science such a dirty business, and what does this long history of dispute say about the nature of science?

Foibles and mistakes

Scientists are people too, although this is easily forgotten thanks to the way science is typically portrayed in the media (seepages 136–139). The work they do is carried out in a social context like any other human endeavour. Scientific ideas themselves emerge from and are often representative of this social context. While the Victorian historiography of science tended to obscure these simple facts, more recent historians of science appreciate that it can only be understood in the light of them. ‘We have come a long way from acceptance of the conventional Victorian belief in the disinterested scientist engaged in the objective pursuit of Truth,’ comments Tony Hallam, a professor of geology and palaeontology (historically two of the more contentious sciences), ‘to a less lofty but more realistic one which takes account of the existence of a whole range of social interactions within the scientific community as determinants of scientific theory.’

Naturally, then, science is prey to the same foibles, insecurities and mistakes as any other field. Just as in politics or sport, there will be personality clashes and power grabs, misunderstandings and betrayals; and, just as in these fields, the people who rise to the top, who achieve the most, are likely to be driven and bloody-minded. As astrophysicist Virginia Trimble points out: ‘nobody who does something earthshaking is likely to be easy to get along with. You only achieve things like that by being more single-minded than your friends and relations are likely to regard as totally reasonable.’

Nasty, brutish and smart

Above and beyond this, however, the nature of science means that conflict is built into its DNA. Science in its purest form is a process of trial and error: hypotheses are formed through observation and experiment, and then these hypotheses are tested with further observation and experiment. If they are supported, they become theories – ‘true’ models of how the world works, perhaps even laws of nature – but even the most solid theory can be revised or overturned if new evidence comes to light (seepages 98–101). This ideal of the scientific method has led some theorists of science to apply Darwinian ideas of natural selection to science itself: ideas are engaged in a constant battle for survival, in which only the fittest will prosper. If science really is so combative by its very nature, it is only to be expected that conflict will result. When the natural proclivities of driven, single-minded individuals are added to this, a combustible mixture results.

Scientists are defined by their ideas and entire careers can hang on a theory, model or interpretation; inevitably they will fight their corners and oppose those who hold competing ideas. Modern science introduces many exacerbating factors – the scramble for funding, the imperative to publish, the politics of academia. Perhaps feuding is the default state for science, and instances of collaboration and concord the real curios.

British bulldog. A caricature of T.H. Huxley from the January 1871 issue of Vanity Fair. Huxley was one of the most pugnacious scientists of his era, and delighted in fighting Darwin’s battles for him, earning Huxley the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’.

KELVIN

vs

LYELL, DARWIN,HUXLEY, et al.

FEUDING PARTIES

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) – physicist, grand old man of British science

vs

Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875) – geologist;

Charles Darwin (1809–82) – naturalist;

T.H. Huxley (1825–95) – biologist;

and many others

DATE

1861–1904

CAUSE OF FEUD

Debate over the age of the Earth

Early scientists, including Newton, generally believed that the biblical account of the Creation was literally true, and therefore that the internal chronology of the Bible could be used to calculate the age of the Earth. Newton himself arrived at a figure of around 6,000 years but it was the Anglo–Irish Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who, in a feat of formidable scholarship, determined that Creation began in the early hours of Sunday, 23 October 4004 BCE.

‘Incomprehensibly vast’

Ussher’s 1654 calculation remained the mainstream view until the 18th century saw the birth of a new science, geology – the study of how the earth was shaped. It became obvious to the practitioners of this nascent science that the processes and phenomena they observed must be acting on timescales much larger than the few millennia allowed by biblical literalism. The deposition of rocks, the uplift and folding of strata and mountains, the erosion of valleys and cliffs; all these spoke of slow processes operating over long periods. The emerging evidence of fossils, with their record of strange forms now vanished from the Earth, also suggested a long passage of time. Indeed, to geologists such as Charles Lyell, author of the seminal Principles of Geology, it seemed likely that natural processes of rock formation and erosion had been occurring for an effectively incalculable length of time; if not for a limitless period, certainly of the order of billions of years.

Meanwhile, another group of scientists was approaching the problem of the age of the Earth from a different angle. Naturalists were becoming increasingly convinced that species of plants and animals had changed over time through some form of evolution, but that this transformative process operated extremely slowly, and therefore constituted its own brand of evidence for the great age of the planet. The expanses of geological time opened up by Lyell were a key plank of Darwin’s argument in his 1859 publication On the Origin of Species, in which he cautioned: ‘He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology and yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.’ To illustrate just how vast these periods had been, Darwin included a rough estimate he had made of the length of time it must have taken for the ocean to erode the Weald (a geological feature in the south-east of England), putting it at around 300 million years.

Lord Kelvin objects

To many at the time, such immense numbers seemed equivalent to eternity, and Lyell and, by extension, Darwin were seen as the standard-bearers of a school of geological thought called uniformitarianism. In its most extreme form, the uniformitarian view was that the Earth had effectively existed forever, and might well continue to do so, its geological processes endlessly cycling through the creation and destruction of landscape features. Lyell and Darwin did not subscribe to this extreme view, but they nonetheless became targets of the ire of a man who had proved that this theory of a never-ending cycle was impossible.

William Thomson, elevated to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs in 1892 (the first scientist to be so honoured) and hence conventionally referred to as ‘Lord Kelvin’ or ‘Kelvin’, had elucidated, among other achievements, the laws of thermodynamics. Briefly stated, these meant that new energy could not be created out of nothing, and that the energy of any system would tend to dissipate. The laws meant that a perpetual-motion machine was impossible, and the endlessly recycling and eternal Earth of the extreme uniformitarians was effectively just that. Kelvin was having none of it.

Chronological confusions. A cartoon from the satirical magazine Punch, from 1869, lampooning the use of the Bible as a basis for determining the age of the Earth.

In March 1862, Kelvin published a paper, ‘On the age of the sun’s heat’, in which he calculated that the Sun had been burning for less than a million years. ‘What then,’ he asked, ‘are we to think of such geological estimates as 300,000,000 years for the “denudation of the Weald”?’ Given that his estimate of the age of the Sun, though imprecise, was based on ‘known physical laws’ and was orders of magnitude less than the figure arrived at by Darwin, he suggested that it was probable that the naturalist had underestimated the speed of erosion that could be caused by ‘a stormy sea, with possibly channel tides of extreme violence’.

Kelvin was one of the world’s great authorities on the dynamics of heat. He started with several assumptions: that the Earth had begun as a ball of molten rock; that, in accordance with his laws of thermodynamics, no heat could have been added to the system since this formation; and that convection currents had allowed uniform cooling of this molten globe to a solid sphere of uniform temperature, which then radiated the rest of its heat out into space from its surface. It was widely known from mining that the ground got hotter as you went down, with a thermal gradient of about 1°F per 50 feet (0.5°C per 15 metres). Kelvin did his own experiments to determine the thermal conductivity of rocks, and employed his mastery of Fourier mathematics to work out how long it must have taken for the planet to cool to its current temperature. He arrived at an estimate of 98 million years, with a range of 20–400 million years for the highest and lowest possible figures.

Burned fingers

Kelvin’s calculation carried enormous authority, thanks both to his eminence and to the manner in which he seemed to have applied ‘hard’ science and ‘pure’ mathematics to a field that had previously been the victim of woolly thinking. The mature and respectable science of physics had set straight the immature new discipline of geology. Darwin was chastened; he considered the age limit that Kelvin had placed on the Earth to be the most serious and credible argument against his carefully worked out theory, which demanded immense epochs of time. The scientist Fleeming Jenkin summarized the argument: ‘The estimates of geologists must yield before the more accurate methods of computation, and these show that our world cannot have been habitable for more than an infinitely insufficient period for the execution of the Darwinian transmutation.’ Darwin himself referred to Kelvin as his ‘sorest trouble’ and an ‘odious spectre’.

TIMELINE

Darwin was so troubled that in the third edition of On The Origin of Species he removed his Weald calculation altogether, but even this did not quiet the criticism from Kelvin and his allies. In April 1869, Darwin was moved to warn Lyell theatrically: ‘Having burned my fingers so consumedly with the Wealden, I am fearful for you ... for heaven’s sake take care of your fingers: to burn them severely, as I have done, is very unpleasant.’

‘The grandest mill’

Darwin may have been running scared, but his self-appointed bulldog, T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley (seepages 38–47), was ever ready to take up the gauntlet on his behalf. In his 1869 presidential address to the Geological Society of London, Huxley defended the views of the ‘old Earthers’ and pointed out the basic flaw in Kelvin’s approach: ‘Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.’ In other words, Kelvin’s calculations might be unimpeachable, but if he had got his starting assumptions wrong then his conclusions would also be wrong.

The scientific world now began to gather behind the respective banners of Kelvin and Huxley. And although the physicist P.G. Tait used a new method to calculate that the Sun was around 20 million years old and the Earth only 10 million, in the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology, Lyell accepted that the age of the Earth was finite but dated the Cambrian era to around 240 million years ago. Although many scientists sought some middle ground, attempting to prove that evolutionary and geological processes might act relatively quickly, operating within Kelvin’s timescale, it was becoming increasingly obvious that both sides could not be correct; someone must be making basic errors.

The geophysicist Osmond Fisher suggested that the error was Kelvin’s, proposing a new (and prescient) model of the structure of the Earth – a thin crust over a plastic substratum – that would destroy the basic assumptions upon which Kelvin had based his calculations. Fisher further pointed out that it was a form of scientific arrogance to disregard the clear evidence of geology and biology: ‘I think we cannot but lament, that mathematical physicists seem to ignore the phenomena upon which our science founds its conclusions, and, instead of seeking for admissible hypotheses the outcome of which, when submitted to calculation, might agree with the facts of geology, they assume one which is suited to the exigencies of some powerful methods of analysis, and having obtained their result, on the strength of it bid bewildered geologists to disbelieve the evidence of their senses.’

In seeking to approach the question of the age of the Earth from the point of view of ‘proper scientists’, the mathematical physicists were actually betraying one of the cardinal rules of science: if the facts do not fit the theory, the theory must be modified or discarded, not the other way round.

The fire within

With opposition to his views mounting, Kelvin was stung to respond. In 1897, he addressed the Victoria Institute with a talk entitled ‘The age of the Earth as an abode fitted for life’. Many assumed he would modify his views or relent. In fact, he was more dogmatic and intransigent than ever, revising his uppermost estimate of the age of the Earth to 24 million years, and talking grandly of ‘certain truths’.

The Badlands of Dakota. This was once the bed of an inland sea. Layers of rock have been revealed by aeons of gradual erosion – or perhaps by a Biblical deluge?

Unfortunately for Kelvin, new discoveries were at hand that would invalidate his fundamental assumption that the Earth had started with limited heat energy and lost heat ever since. Radioactivity had been discovered in 1896, and in 1903 the French chemist Pierre Curie realized the potential geological significance of heat generation by radioactive elements in rocks. The following year, the greatest of the new generation of physicists, Ernest Rutherford, lectured at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the topic of radium and of radioactive elements as a source of heat energy. Noticing Lord Kelvin in the audience, he realized he was ‘in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me! Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth provided no new source of heat was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold, the old boy beamed upon me.’

In practice, Kelvin continued to deny that radioactivity had rewritten the rules of the debate. However, by the time he died in 1907, radioisotope dating was already being used to make direct measurements of the age of rocks, with samples dated at up to 2.2 billion years old. By 1931, the geologist Arthur Holmes was able to assure a US National Research Council meeting that ‘the age of the Earth exceeds 1,460 million years [and] is probably not less than 1,600 million years’. Modern dating techniques reliably prove that the Earth is around 4.55 billion years old (see box below).

‘As Lord Kelvin is the highest authority in science now living, I think we must yield to him and accept his views.’

MARK TWAIN, LETTERS FROM THE EARTH, 1909

EVIDENCE FOR THE AGE OF THE EARTHHow do we know how old the Earth is?

There are three primary methods, all of which measure the age of rock by comparing the ratios of isotopes they contain (radiometric dating). The oldest rocks so far discovered on Earth are around 3.9 billion years old, and some include minerals that are even older (around 4.2 billion years old). This puts a lower limit on the age of the Earth, but not an upper one, since none of the original surface of the Earth still exists, thanks to its molten nature and subsequent processes of erosion and crustal recycling.

More direct means of calculating the age of the Earth are based on the assumption that all the rocky material in the solar system formed at the same time, and from the same pool of material (as a giant disc of dust and gas coalesced into solid matter). Different isotopes of uranium decay into different isotopes of lead and, by measuring the ratios of these isotopes in Earth rock and meteorites, it is possible to plot a graph of the values and calculate from it the amount of time that has elapsed since the original pool of matter became separated into discrete objects. This method, known as lead isochron dating, gives a figure of around 4.55 billion years, as does the other direct method, which is radiometric dating of meteorites (asteroids that have fallen to Earth). Unlike the Earth, asteroids do not undergo geological processes and therefore may date back to the formation of the Solar System. Around 100 meteorites have been dated, and the ages obtained are almost all around 4.5 billion years.

WEGENER

vs

JEFFREYS, et al.

FEUDING PARTIES

Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880–1930) – German meteorologist and astronomer, architect of continental drift theory

vs

Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989) – geophysicist;

most of the rest of the geological world

DATE

1915–60s

CAUSE OF FEUD

The theory of continental drift

The story of Alfred Wegener and the theory of continental drift is often cited as a prime example of how theories that are beyond the pale can rapidly become accepted scientific dogma and of the way in which the real narrative of science (messy, contradictory and contentious) is quite different from the ‘classical’ picture of a serene progress from ignorance to enlightenment. In truth, the Wegener case is not a brilliant illustration of either of these, but it remains a popular and fascinating story.

The shrinking Earth

The most obvious evidence for the notion that the continents were once joined is the apparent fit between the coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa, which became apparent almost as soon as the first maps of the New World were produced. As early as 1596, Dutch map-maker Abraham Ortelius suggested that the Americas had once been joined to Europe and Africa, until they had been ‘torn away ... by earthquakes and floods’.

In 1881, pioneer geophysicist Osmond Fisher proposed a model of the Earth in which a crust of hard rock sat atop a fluid mantle, even suggesting that the ocean floor expanded through volcanic production of new rock, and that contraction of the continents gave rise to mountain ranges. This was a remarkably prescient prototype of modern plate tectonics theory, which went unheralded. Fisher was going against the grain of an Anglo–American tradition that emphasized the relative permanence of the oceans and continents. While in the German-speaking world the notion that the crust of the planet was mobile and the interior fluid had some currency, the mainstream hypothesis was that the Earth was cooling from an initial molten state (seepage 17), and in the process contracting, so that its skin rumpled and creased, creating mountain ranges and oceanic basins.

Scientific adventurer

Onto this scene burst Alfred Wegener, an intrepid meteorologist and astronomer. Struck, like many, by the jigsaw-like fit of the South American and African coastlines, Wegener was intrigued when, in 1911, he came across a report outlining palaeontological connections between Brazil and Africa (such as fossils of the same species on both continents). Many other such connections between far-flung regions were known, but they were generally presumed to indicate the former existence of land bridges, now sunk beneath the oceans.

TIMELINE

Wegener claimed not to be aware of the ‘continental drift’ hypothesis of the American geographer F.B. Taylor, published in 1910, and in 1912 he came up with his own, similar theory. He fleshed out this theory in a 1915 book, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of the Continents and Oceans), in which he laid out several strands of evidence for his theory of ‘Die Verschiebung der Kontinente’, properly translated as ‘continental displacement’.

Meteorological expedition in the Arctic. Wegener’s research background was in meteorology rather than geology. The vitriolic response to his geological theories was partly motivated by his outsider status.

Wegener, left, on one of his research trips in the Arctic.

Wegener’s theory

Wegener began by discussing flaws in the current contraction model: for instance, if the globe was uniformly contracting, why were the mountain ranges and ocean basins so unevenly distributed? He pointed to clear evidence that there were two distinct types of crustal rock – continental and oceanic – and tried to show how the strata underlying continental crust could deform under great pressure over long periods of time until it acted almost like a fluid (much as ice will). He collated evidence of similarities in rock types and strata on either side of the Atlantic, which suggested former contiguity, arguing: ‘It is just as if we were to refit the torn pieces of a newspaper by matching their edges and then check whether the lines of print run smoothly across.’

To this evidence he added the mounting evidence from the fossil record of species found on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Mesosaurus, a small reptile from the Permian era, and Glossopteris, a plant from the Permo-Carboniferous era. These distributions could not be explained by now-sunken land bridges, he pointed out, because such land bridges were an impossibility: continental granite was less dense than oceanic basalt, and therefore could not sink into the ocean floor. The prevailing belief in these land bridges was, he wrote, ‘a perfectly preposterous attitude’.

Wegener was particularly impressed by the presence at high latitudes of rock types and coal deposits that must have formed in the tropics. All this evidence suggested to him that the continents must once have been joined, and must, over time, have wandered across the face of the globe, like huge icebergs slowly forcing their way through thinner pack ice. He retraced their wanderings to a point where they were all joined together in a super-continent he termed Pangaea (from the Greek for ‘all land’). What force might conceivably drive such epic migrations he could not say for sure. Perhaps foolishly, however, he was willing to speculate that a Pohlfluct (‘flight from the Poles’) and some form of tidal friction might be jointly responsible.

‘If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again.’

R.T. CHAMBERLAIN, 1926

The gathering storm

Right from the start, Wegener faced criticism for his bold attempt to cut across disciplines and forge a radical new theory. His father-in-law, who was a respected meteorologist, tried to dissuade him as early as 1911. Wegener defended himself: ‘I believe that you consider my primordial continent to be a figment of my imagination, but it is only a question of interpretation of observations ... Why should we delay in throwing the old concept overboard? Is this revolutionary? I don’t believe that the old ideas have more than a decade to live.’ His optimism was ill-founded.

Criticism began soon after publication and continued for decades. In 1922, Philip Lake dismissed him as ‘not seeking truth [but] advocating a cause ... blind to every fact and argument that tells against it.’ Lake savaged the attempt to reconstruct Pangaea by fitting together the coastlines of the continents: ‘It is easy to fit the pieces of a puzzle together if you distort their shape.’ In fact, the true fit is between the continental shelves, but these were not well mapped at this point. A year later, G.W. Lamplugh described Wegener’s theory as ‘vulnerable in almost every statement’, while R.D. Oldham wrote that ‘it was more than any man who valued his reputation for scientific sanity ought to venture on.’

Pangaea to present. A series of maps – showing equatorial and polar views – from Wegener’s book, The Origin of the Continents and Oceans, showing the positions of the continents at different periods in geological history, beginning with his hypothetical supercontinent.

One of the most influential, trenchant and unrelenting critics of continental drift was the geophysicist Harold Jeffreys, who was particularly unimpressed with Wegener’s notion of the continents sailing through a plastic ocean floor. He described it as ‘a very dangerous [idea], and liable to lead to serious error.’ Jeffreys calculated that the two forces Wegener had proposed as drivers of drift – a Pohlfluct and some form of tidal friction – could only provide one-millionth of the force that would be needed.

Opposition to continental drift came to a head at a symposium of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held in New York in 1926, which both Wegener and Taylor attended. Attendees took turns to bash the theory. C.R. Longwell talked of, ‘the very completeness of the iconoclasm, this rebellion against the established order ... Its daring and spectacular character appeals to the imagination ... But [it] must have a sounder basis than imaginative appeal.’ Palaeontologist E.W. Berry accused Wegener of ‘a state of auto-intoxication in which the subjective idea comes to be considered an objective fact.’ T.C. Chamberlain accused Wegener of ‘taking considerable liberties with our globe’, and his son, R.T. Chamberlain, would later wonder, ‘Can we call geology a science when there exists such differences of opinion on fundamental matters as to make it possible for such a theory as this to run wild?’ Harsh words were still being aimed at Wegener long after his death. In 1949, the revered geological engineer Bailey Willis described continental drift as ‘a fairy tale’.

Continental margin, according to the modern day model of plate tectonics, developed in the 1960s.

‘And yet it moves’

Such vitriol, and the phrases deployed by his detractors, led many to compare Wegener to Galileo (seepages 166–171). Indeed, Our Mobile Earth, a book by a supporter of continental drift, Reginald Daly, included as an epigram Galileo’s famous alleged observation ‘E pur si Muove’ – ‘And yet it moves’. Wegener’s supporters felt vindicated when advances in oceanography and geology after the Second World War seemed to prove he had been correct after all. Bands of magnetic anomalies in ocean-floor rocks showed that the rocks had indeed been spreading, and the discovery of a network of mid-oceanic ridges where volcanic activity was pumping out new seabed explained why.

In 1960, Henry Hess proposed the spreading sea-floor hypothesis, explaining, ‘The continents do not plough through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces, rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it.’ By 1965, Tuzo Wilson had synthesized the new discoveries into a comprehensive theory of plate tectonics, explaining how and why continents drifted, oceans spread, mountains were created, rift valleys opened, volcanoes erupted and islands formed.