Submitted by Hot----------Dog t3_xur1gi in todayilearned
He was mostly an astronomer and meteorologist though. He was literally just a dude who noticed all the continents fit together like jigsaw pieces. That's literally all he had but he was right.
History is full of people who were right being ridiculed or worse.
He had more than that. Matching fossil and geologic strata/formations from where the continents would connect, but yeah, no smoking gun.
I love this song.
>He wasn’t able to explain WHY it was happening though.
Wegener apparently thought continents plowed through the ocean floor.
That's... not exactly wrong. Continental crusts ARE significantly thicker than oceanic crusts. You can kind of think of them like icebreaking ships drifting through ice sheets.
https://cdn.britannica.com/83/99283-050-AEC2FFB6/cross-section-layers-Earth-mantle-crust.jpg
But mostly wrong. They're not plowing through as much as they are riding over/oceanic plates are subducting under them. Continental crust is not pushing through an oceanic plate.
Wegener didn't understand that a crustal plate could contain continental crust, oceanic crust, or both. The continents move as parts of the plates spread and/or subduct.
Exactly. You don't get to make incredible claims that change our entire understanding of the world, present absolutely nothing to back up your claim, and then complain when they say you're crazy.
Being right doesn't matter, either. If someone in the 1500's just started claiming that all matter was composed of really really small strings, and his reasoning was "I ate some bread with LSD-precursor fungus and a mouth opened up in the center of my hand and started telling me about the strings", we'd say he was crazy, even though he was (maybe) right.
There was evidence he presented that showed it was happening, he just couldn't provide a how. That's a far cry from "absolutely nothing to back up your claim".
yes it does matter....it's like you're trying to rewrite how we look at how history has made nearly all discovery and applying the way we react to people using their own mind and attempting to make discoveries today, people didn't "internet react" to people having original thoughts back then like they do today.
His "perception" to pay attention to things that other people were overlooking for years was right whether you or anyone else could see it which is the point of discovery.
I see why you would feel that way, and maybe you’re looking at it the right way idk. But I personally don’t think so. What if I were to just start making a thousand guesses a day? No basis, I’m just going for the shotgun strategy. One of them will end up being right and I’ll be a genius. That’s a dramatic example but it’s meant to be, just to shine a light on the idea that just being the first to propose an idea without any evidence might not have a lot of importance to it.
Well did this guy just start making a thousand guesses a day? I mean if not then, yea, what you so eloquently typed out is quite dramatic and a mildly ignorant straw man scenario based off what seems like some pretty strong anti-intellectualism.
I tried specifically calling out that this was a thought experiment and not a realistic scenario, and you still made the argument you did..extreme scenarios are presented all the time in logic and philosophy for the sake of making it easier to a see a hidden truth.
"Thought experiment"
Why are you getting so aggressive? I feel like I was very nice in the first comment. It is a thought experiment.
Putting two words in quotations is aggressive. Got it.
Now you’re just playing dumb. I think we’re done here.
> I think we're done here.
Finally talking some sense.
I mean, what evidence was there for the alternative, that was completely wrong?
Well, if you're serious, the evidence that the continents didn't move was that nobody had ever seen them move, and they were in the same place they always had been as far back as there were records, at least as much as was possible to measure with the technology of the time.
To be fair M-theory or string theory has no way of being proven experimentally as of now. Which basically means, according to modern empirical sciences, that it's not really true in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is. Or the theory of relativity.
That's not to say that it's not correct. Democritus theorized the atom but had no evidence for them. Turned out they were real. There was another guy named Kaṇāda that did it as well. So maybe we will get some thing we can build to verify string theory with a apparatus. And considering how much empirical evidence does technically back up string theory, it probably is true.
It's a very strange thing in the community of physicists. They wont shut up about needing experimental evidence to show that something is true. And then they just go YEAH STRING THEORY BABY.
Name something m-theory has been used for to generate empirically falsifiable hypotheses. Anyone? Yeah, we're all out of our depth here.
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i like your version of democritus better.
In not saying you are wrong, but iirc,
a) there are a lot of theorems that "came to people" from the use of drugs and have been proven
b) sometimes people notice patterns that people, actually working in that field, dont see due to having other neuronal pathways and seeing things differently
And I for one would like to imagine that spreading thorems is a good way to test and improve current models and maybe gain a different view on them that lets one notice blindspots of it
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I get what you mean. I don’t know how those other people don’t get what you’re saying here
Then explain religion lol
Yeah, the mechanism wasn’t discovered until the US started dragging magnets all over the Atlantic searching for German subs during WWII (very simplified explanation)
I had an old professor who said, everyone knew it was true, we didn't know how.
Hypothesis -> hypotheses
Kinda like Galileo,
all new thoughts that rub up against mainstream thinking are treated like this.
germ theory of disease, the idea that the universe had a beginning, almost any major shift in thinking is immediately met with ad hominems and ridicule within the scientific community.
Often quoted as "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
Ignaz Semmelweis, the first to realize that physicians washing their hands saved the lives of women in childbirth, died in an asylum after being ridiculed by doctors who saw no reason to wash between touching corpses and delivering babies. He died of gangrene from beatings by guards. What a heartbreaking life, knowing he figured out how to keep women alive, only to be crushed by the system because no one knew about germs.
Something like: “People we’re once ridiculed for saying the Covid vaccine wasn’t as effective as we were initially led to believe.”
Yeah that vocal minority of people are just politely saying it's not as effective as we initially thought and not that it doesn't work at all and is giving people autism
Don't forget how it's going to sterilize and/or kill us to fulfill the Jews' Globalist Elite's plan to depopulate the Earth.
Never said that
If you’re anything like 99% of antivaxxers, you used to but moved the goalposts once people didn’t start dropping dead in the street.
That’s what I was saying. Never said it gave you autism
I didn't say you said it either?
>wasn’t as effective as we were initially led to believe.
What were we "initially led to believe"?
I was initially led to believe that the vaccine was highly effective at preventing serious cases and that the virus was highly mutable. So far everything checks out.
That it “prevented transmission” which was untrue but considered “misinformation” to say otherwise
It did prevent transmission until delta got here
No. It. Did. Not.
Yes. It. Did.
You think that if it's not 100% effective, it's not working.
But that's not how science works, and especially not how health science works, and it's not ever what the science said.
If you stopped to actually read actual scientific studies from scientists that study this stuff, instead of memes based off of press releases from politicians, you would know what the veracity was, and how it worked for each of the vaccines (there were easy to read tables and everything). And when delta came out, they updated the tables, and surprise, it worked, just not as well, and the scientific releases reflected the changes, and the likely explanation with the information they had at the time (which turned out to be relitively accurate for the fly by the seat of your pants fast pace this stuff was going down).
This whole thing really highlighted the lack of health science literacy in the world, and the difficulty in fixing that issue.
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> What were we "initially led to believe"?
95% reduction in infection.
> I was initially led to believe that the vaccine was highly effective at preventing serious cases and that the virus was highly mutable
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
No we will still ridicule you
Haha, every downvote you get demonstrates the mechanism at work.
Yes, scientists in the past were wrong and that’s very important to remember but not important enough that you are allowed to question scientists who have produced a conclusion I support!
What a ridiculous notion. Next he'll say that these flying landmasses crash into each other like automobiles and cause earthquakes
Errrrr... meteors were also considered to be superstition and delirious popular imagination. Even when a meteor crater was shown scientists of the time would say that "clearly" that was caused by some atmospheric phenomenon, like lightning.
I wonder which phenomena are considered kooky today that will be proven beyond doubt in decades and centuries to come.
P.S.: oh, I think you were talking about plate tectonics. "Flying landmasses" got me confused, big asteroids are island-sized. :)
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I dunno if you looked through the rest of that site, but holy shit is that place full of crazy fucking conspiracy nonsense.
They've got JFK assassinated by a cabal of ruthless warmongers, 9/11 truthiness, climate "skepticism", the whole lot.
Aside, and this is my own biases/aggravations showing through, but the "Quantum Quirk" (WTF is that name?) that popped up for me is a blatantly staged photo with posed dragonflies.
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So you don't understand why I called out the previous website you posted.
Hint: it isn't about "dislike".
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A website full of conspiracy nonsense and science denial calls into question the veracity of anything posted on it. I admittedly don't know enough of the specific history recounted to debunk any particular claim in the article but still.
And it wasn't a "magic" bullet when bullets can and do deflect at odd angles upon impacting bone. Bone is very dense and expecting straight line trajectories through a body as though it's a video game is foolish.
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If you think history cannot be interpreted with biases, I invite you to look at the white european's "history" of African civilizations while they were busy exploiting the fuck out of the continent.(and after)
Yeaaah, not getting in to debating rigorously debunked conspiracy nonsense with you.
Like automobiles hitting 60 mph and causing your molecules to separate.
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Outside of his areas of actual expertise, Linus Pauling was a giant box of Dunning Krueger effect.
This is actually very common among Nobel laureates especially. I think it's probably the ego inflation due to being a Nobel laureate. "I won a Nobel, I must have useful things to say on every subject!"
It's also common between different fields. For instance, though controversial, Egyptologists dismissing geologists saying "hey, some of this stone was weathered by lots of rain over a long period of time."
"Nah, some dude a hundred years ago said this was carved at this time, and we don't want to update our textbooks, so you must be wrong."
Jordan Peterson comes to mind, everytime he speaks outside of a specific branch of psychology
Quasi crystals and how they relate to the foundation of everything is still a developing theory i thought? Much like string theory, is still a theory
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The science community can be just as dogmatic as any religious community.
The science community will radically change its views based on evidence, just like they did when later evidence for plate tectonics showed that continental drift was true, or when the evidence backed Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. I can't think of anything similar in religious dogma. Like, pretty much every scholar and archeologist in the world is in agreement that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, and that the things it describes are historically impossible, but you don't see the LDS Church accepting that evidence.
Science generally has the ability to accept indisputable evidence and realize that "Holy shit, they really were right and we were wrong." Where religions in general have proven incapable of doing so over and over throughout history.
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Except that the scientific community's response was perfectly justified. Science is supposed to reject new ideas that are presented without support. The entire point of the scientific method is to take people's hypotheses and attempt to prove them wrong.
Wegener's proposed mechanism for continental drift was the rotation of the earth, and he estimated that the continents were moving at approximately 250cm per year.
Just because part of his idea (that the continents move) was right doesn't mean that his claim should have been accepted uncritically. Making extraordinary claims that just happen to be correct - without actually explaining anything about it, or presenting sufficient evidence - doesn't make you a genius. It just makes you lucky.
Kinda like how Gugliemo Marconi beat both Tesla and Edison to the invention of wireless telegraph tech specifically because he wasnt shackled by scientific dogma? His views on the "ether" have been soundly disproved but he got results even if his reasoning for it was deeply flawed. Its one thing to not be "accepted uncritically" but the issue is the massive ridicule being lobbed just because theories dont fit neatly into established and "accepted" paradigms.
Not sure why downvoted, at surface level his reasons were bunk but still got him a nobel prize.
r/science in a nutshell
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How is that a cop out? Genuinely not sure what you mean
“A professor with his bone can be almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone.” — G. K. Chesterton
*disclaimer, I’m not an evolution denier. I’m not convinced Chesterton was either. I think he just liked trolling scientists and philosophers sometimes.
There are numerous lessons that could be learned here.
Scientists are human beings and, hence, fallible. Presented with an idea this much at odds with current understanding, they resorted to ad hominem attacks.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This was a big change to current understanding, and the initially proposed mechanisms simply did not work.
The process did eventually work. The evidence collected by Wegener remained in the record and when additional evidence (that helped explain the mechanism) was discovered, the opinion of the scientific community began to change.
While there have been "crackpot" ideas eventually proved correct, there have been many more that remained utterly unfounded. When presented with an idea that defies the current consensus, look at *why* it disagrees with the consensus and see what it would take for it to be correct.
Vitalism in the 1870s was obvious until chemistry caught up. Still idiots talking about the ether though.
Amazing that people didn't see it. Even when I was a little kid, I was like wow South America and Africa are like puzzle pieces that fit together
I don't remember the title, but when I was an undergraduate (~1988) my professor told us that our geology textbook was the first one to include the theory of plate tectonics as the 'standard theory'.
Apparently it was revolutionary.
There was even had a chapter on magnetic drift.
It's hard to imagine that there was a 'standard theory' before that.
Germanic?! That's the worst kind of pseudo -science!
When I was in school they would show us maps of 'pangea' and we'd see how the continents would obviously fit together to make it.
Then the teacher would tell us 'that was coincidence' and that continents don't move.
I'm gonna call bullshit. If your teacher didn't think Pangea existed, why was she showing you a map of it?
She could have been a Christian teacher (young earth creationist) who didn't agree with the material in the book?
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How old are you?
Guessing you're at most in your 20s
And no, anti-vaxxers, this doesn't mean you're right. Your claims are still ludicrous and backed by falsehoods you choose to believe because it supports your beliefs.
You can read more about the discovery of tectonic plate movement in Krakatoa by Simon Winchester.
It's the strangest thing, because even a child can see the continents and islands can fit back together like a jigsaw.
My 8th grade science class did a mock trial with him as the defendant. It was a lot of fun.
This is why I always trust the science. Because the science is always right about everything.
Is it me or does he bear a striking resemblance to Rammstein front man Till Lindemann?
Makes you wonder who they'll say that about in another 100 years.
Just look at a map and you can see where borders could fit.
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No wonder she is your ex
LMAO!
Libraries even put books on Continental Drift in their Crackpot Theories section, not "Science."
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And the guy that came up with tectonic plate theory in the 60s was widely ridicules by the scientific concensus.
They wrote peer reviewed papers to discredit him and used propaganda and appeal to authority to undermine him.
The same thing happened with Einstein. 100 scientists banded together and wrote a paper on how wrong he was.
I like the 1960 example better because it's recent history of the concensus being wrong and should have taught us concensus isn't science.
But here we are taxing the crap out of people for an unproven garbage CO2 theory using garbage models and concensus as "the science".
Politicians controlling science..
Currently happening with Unrah radiation
No, it isn’t. Can you cite an actual detection of the unruh effect?
Lynch, M. H.; Cohen, E.; Hadad, Y.; Kaminer, I. (2021). "Experimental Observation of Acceleration-Induced Thermality" seems to be a peer-reviewed article by CERN scientists, claiming to have detected it.
Not a physicist though, so I can't really say if that means anything.
And no way the scientific community enforces an orthodoxy in this day and age.
Right?
RIGHT???
They probably called him a denier.
Some The Science™-denier already downvoted my comment. 👩🔬
Now you all must be thinking that this is the doing of our uncivilised ancestors.
No.
Climate change was first named global warming to mock the idea.
Look how people mocked Dr. Fauci for literally stating accepted science.
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MechTheDane t1_iqxcdo3 wrote
He wasn’t able to explain WHY it was happening though. His inability to come up with the mechanism, and his incorrect hypothesis’s for it; are the primary reason for his ridicule and the disbelief. Someone else, later on, had to do the hard part of figuring out why continents moved, and then after that this guys theory was accepted.