Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists came to accept four counterintuitive yet fundamental facts about the Earth: deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact, and global warming. When first suggested, each proposition violated scientific orthodoxy and was quickly denounced as scientific—and sometimes religious—heresy. Nevertheless, after decades of rejection, scientists came to accept each theory. The stories behind these four discoveries reflect more than the fascinating push and pull of scientific work. They reveal the provocative nature of science and how it raises profound and sometimes uncomfortable truths as it advances. For example, counter to common sense, the Earth and the solar system are older than all of human existence; the interactions among the moving plates and the continents they carry account for nearly all of the Earth's surface features; and nearly every important feature of our solar system results from the chance collision of objects in space. Most surprising of all, we humans have altered the climate of an entire planet and now threaten the future of civilization. This absorbing scientific history is the only book to describe the evolution of these four ideas from heresy to truth, showing how science works in practice and how it inevitably corrects the mistakes of its practitioners. Scientists can be wrong, but they do not stay wrong. In the process, astonishing ideas are born, tested, and over time take root.
How does science advance from entrenched orthodoxy to embrace new ideas? How do we come to accept as truths propositions that at first seem like heresies?
Opdyke had arrived at Lamont with plans for a paleomagnetics laboratory modeled after that of Ian Gough at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ( now Zimbabwe ) in Salisbury , where the equipment had been developed by Gough ...
History of the Earth Sciences During the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions: With Special Emphasis on the Physical Geosciences
But when the mind balks at the vertiginous complexity of the universe, science unveils the elegance amid the chaos. In this book, Thomas R. Scott ventures into the known and the unknown to explain our universe and the laws that govern it.
This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.
They shared what were clearly communal burrows, with an entrance tunnel wide enough that individuals going in opposite directions could pass one another. Lower down there were branching tunnels and numerous terminating chambers.
Cohen's exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the ...
In contrast to this radically novel sense of nature's own contingent history, the earth's unimaginably vast timescale was already taken for granted by many naturalists (though not yet by the wider public), and the concurrent development of ...
John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Pubic Goal; in Turbulent Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 9. . Bernard Marr and James Creelman, More with Less: Maximizing ...
But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development.