When continental drift was considered pseudoscience

Remember when the earth used to be flat and to behave nice and static?

Well it has only been hundred years that we know the face of the earth changes. But the idea of continental drift was very much debated back then. It was ridiculed for being pseudoscience and a stranger to geology. And there is a simple reason as for why:

?If we are to believe Wegener?s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.?

But Wegener was far away from pseudoscience when forming his hypothesis. He didn’t treat his hypothesis as a static fact. When asked to provide a mechanism that could move tectonic plates he actually provided six, from which one was already very close to today?s plate tectonics.

Read about the struggle of a well established scientific theory: http://bit.ly/K6krFQ
-JSD

via The Earth Story’s Facebook Wall

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Jesper Dramsch

PhD Student at The Way of the Geophysicist

... is a geophysicist by heart. He works at the intersection of machine learning and geoscience. He is the founder of The Way of the Geophysicist and a deep learning enthusiast. Writing mostly about computational geoscience and interesting bits and pieces relevant to post-grad life.

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