Are Scientists Always Smart?

Guest post by Steven Goddard

There is no question that some of the greatest minds have been scientists.  Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman are a few names that come to mind.

But how about the consensus?  One of the most famous cases of consensus science gone ridiculous involved the theory of Continental Drift.  In 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener introduced the theory that the continents were not stationary, but rather moved.

Any child can see that the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, yet the scientific community took over 50 years to stop ridiculing Wegener and accept his theory.

“Utter, damned rot!” said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

Anyone who “valued his reputation for scientific sanity” would never dare support such a theory, said a British geologist.

“If we are to believe in Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again.” Geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain

“further discussion of it merely incumbers the literature and befogs the mind of fellow students.”    Geologist Barry Willis

Sound familiar?

http://travel.state.gov/images/maps/brazil.gif

http://www.globalkids.info/v3/content/africa.jpg

Several earlier scientists had also observed the obvious – from Wikipedia :

Abraham Ortelius (1597), Francis Bacon (1625), Benjamin Franklin, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. W. J. Kious described Ortelius’ thoughts in this way:[1]

Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus … suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].

Not only do the continents fit together, but Wegener observed that their geology matched.

http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-DuToit.jpeg

And the fossils match.

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http://www.scientus.org/Pellegrini-Wegener-1.gif

We see a parallel to global warming.  The earth is not warming out of control.  Sea level is not rising out of control.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not collapsing.  The IPCC documents have been shown to be littered with junk science and fraud.  The hockey team has been shown to be misusing their positions.  Yet the consensus hangs on to the ridiculous, for the same reasons they did from 1912 to 1960.  No one wants to “forget what they learned and start over again.”