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Good Reads  History & Other Humanities  History of Science & Nature

Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences From Heresy to Truth

By: James Lawrence Powell(Author)
367 pages, 27 b/w photos and illustrations
NHBS
A riveting story of the progress of science, looking at four theories in the geosciences that went from heretical suggestions to accepted ideas.
Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences
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  • Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences ISBN: 9780231164481 Hardback Jan 2015 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £34.99
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About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists came to accept four counter-intuitive 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 and many in the public grew to acknowledge the truth of 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, which raises profound and uncomfortable truths as it advances. For example, 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 have altered the climate of an entire planet and threaten the future of human 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 science can be trusted. In the process, astonishing ideas are born and, over time, take root.

Contents

Preface
Introduction

Part I. Deep Time
The Abyss of Time
A Great Mistake Has Been Made
The Bank of Time
Account Overdrawn
Strange Rays
An Hourglass of Great Precision
Geochronology
Duck Soup

Part II. Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics
An Idea to Pursue
A Very Trusting Man
Dead on Arrival
Geologists Unite Against Heresy
Continental Drift: Not Even Wrong
Postwar Surprises
Wandering Poles or Drifting Continents?
The Final Confrontation
Spreading Seafloors
HypotHESSes
The Discovery of the Century
All This Rubbish

Part III. Meteorite Impact
A Trivial Process
To Hunt a Star
The Moon’s Face
Rosetta Stone
To a Rocky Moon
Worlds in Collision
Dinosaur Killer
Out with a Bang
Cosmic Pinball

Part IV. Global Warming
Origins of the CO2 Theory
Tedious Calculations of Extraordinary Interest
Destructive Criticism
A Unique Experiment of Planetary Dimensions
Giant Brains
Warming Is Unequivocal
From Heresy to Truth

Acknowledgments
Recommended Reading
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews (1)

  • Riveting story of how science progresses
    By Leon (NHBS Catalogue Editor) 10 Sep 2018 Written for Hardback


    Try as we might, science is very much the work of human beings with all their foibles. As such, scientific advances aren't always straightforward and can run into opposition within scientific circles when new ideas run counter to currently established ones. In Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences, American geologist James Lawrence Powell demonstrates this by taking the reader through the history of four ideas in the earth sciences that initially weren't accepted. This was a book I very much wanted to read.

    The four ideas Powell tackles are the age of the Earth, continental drift and plate tectonics, meteorite impact, and the role of CO2 in global warming. Nowadays all these ideas are thoroughly accepted and solidly supported by empirical evidence, but each had its own tortuous journey to get to that point. And each of these journeys was different in its own way.

    The age of the earth was initially estimated at hundreds of millions of years. Thermodynamic calculations by Lord Kelvin, based on the rate at which the planet cooled since its formation, started adjusting that number downwards to ultimately some 20 million years only. Much too short for evolutionary processes Darwin had suggested. Around the 1900s this all changed when physicists discovered that constant levels of radioactive decay of atoms could be used to date, for example, rocks. For a fuller discussion on this, I refer the reader to Macdougall's Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything. These discoveries ultimately led to an age estimate for the earth of 4.6 billion years.

    Continental drift and plate tectonics were put forward by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in 1912. This is the idea that over geological time the continents have moved over the face of the earth. Wegener simply looked at maps and noticed how South America and Africa look like two puzzle pieces that fit neatly together. Until then geologists were convinced that the continents had always been where they are now. It took six decades for this idea to become accepted and it was so much discussed that Henry R. Frankel needed over 2000 pages spread over four books to give a complete overview of its history in his magisterial The Continental Drift Controversy. This section is a beautiful example of a paradigm shift as philosopher Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Evidence from various disciplines, including biogeography and geophysics, started to come together until scientists could no longer keep denying that the continental plates indeed move. The proposed mechanism, plate tectonics, holds that convection of deep layers in the planet moves the overlying plates around, causing seafloor spreading in some areas and subduction in others as one plate is pushed or dragged under another [edit: shame on me, as The Tectonic Plates are Moving! points out, this is a common misconception, even today. It is actually subduction that causes convection, not vice versa]. This has question marks around it, though, and Powell points out that we still haven't nailed down the exact mechanism. We may yet again see a paradigm shift here as observations accumulate to refute this idea. Or not.

    Meteor strikes are another example of an explanation that was initially not accepted. Geology was ruled by uniformitarianism, the idea that changes were slow and gradual, and invocation of external influences was unnecessary. I have written about this before when I reviewed Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century. The most famous example was, of course, the mounting evidence for a large meteor strike at the K-Pg boundary that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. For more on this, see my review of The Ends of The World and Walter Alvarez's own account in T. rex and the Crater of Doom. But meteor strikes are also invoked to explain impact structures on earth and the moon (previously thought to be of volcanic origin), and even the formation of the moon (see The Big Splat: Or How Our Moon Came to Be for more on that).

    Finally, and most familiar to readers, is the role of CO2 in global warming, which was put forward by Guy Callendar (in all the current hubbub his name seems all but lost to memory, and readers would do well to turn to his biography The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964)). Initially, there was doubt whether adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would have much influence, as other gases were thought to be more important in absorbing heat radiation from the sun. It took an increased understanding of the fiendishly complicated interactions between land, water, air and the living world, together with increases in computing power, before we could really understand this. Uniquely, global warming has become subject of a huge public and political debate, and a powerful industry lobby denying climate change is real. Powell wrote about this in The Inquisition of Climate Science.

    Powell's account of each of these four theories – and their rise from heresy to truth – makes for an absolutely fascinating read. This is very much a human story, and it's amazing to read the hubris, stubbornness and pride on display, especially where senior scientists were concerned. As mentioned above, science is a human endeavour, and for many people it's clearly hard to admit they are wrong and let go of cherished ideas. Even entertaining this notion and being willing to cooperate with others to try and falsify ideas was not in vogue in the past. Have we gotten any better at this? Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but I'd like to think science has become more collaborative, and scientists a bit wiser and more humble. Powell's riveting book serves as a powerful and well-written reminder why we should be. If you have any interest in the history of science or how science progresses this book comes highly recommended.
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Biography

James Lawrence Powell serves as executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool that includes women and minorities. He received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at Oberlin College and served as its acting president. He has also been president of Franklin and Marshall College, Reed College, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush both appointed Powell to the National Science Board. He is also the author of The Inquisition of Climate Science.

By: James Lawrence Powell(Author)
367 pages, 27 b/w photos and illustrations
NHBS
A riveting story of the progress of science, looking at four theories in the geosciences that went from heretical suggestions to accepted ideas.
Media reviews

"Powell breaks new ground. His scholarship is deep, and his stories are well-written and enriched with human detail. Anyone with an interest in how science progresses will profit from reading this."
– Spencer Weart, Director Emeritus of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics

"Absorbing."
Publishers Weekly

"This clear and well-written book offers four classic examples that show how science progresses – despite tough opposition, generally accepted ideas are often slowly replaced by newer, better ones. As an apocryphal medical school dean told incoming students: 'Half of what we will teach you in the next four years is wrong. The problem is that we don't know which half.' James Lawrence Powell's new title provides a lively look at how the sciences, in this case the geosciences, really work."
– Seth Stein, Northwestern University, author of Disaster Deferred: How New Science is Changing Our View of Earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone

"This is first-rate story telling, with heroes, villians, and the often-unexpected discoveries that created revolutions in our concept of the planet."
– David Morrison, Skeptical Inquirer

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