Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences
From Heresy to Truth
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- 42,99 €
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- 42,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powell (The Inquisition of Climate Science), executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, takes a historical look at four truths in the earth sciences and how these truths came to be accepted. While he gives equal weight to his treatments of the age of the earth, continental drift, meteorite impacts, and global warming, it is his goal to use the first three topics to help inform understanding of the fourth. With each subject in turn, Powell begins with first thoughts on the matter and then tracks opposed views until the mounting data in each case is able to "transform heresy into truth." Scientists come off as fallible and stubborn as anyone, and indeed Powell says that "in science, being wrong is inevitable and indispensable." But he makes it clear that the process of science eventually succeeds in producing the best explanation of available data. In the case of anthropogenic global warming, there is no dispute in the scientific community and, despite media claims, this is borne out by peer-reviewed articles (of which only one in a thousand claims that this is not the case). Powell concludes that Big Oil is doing exactly what Big Tobacco did in trying to obscure the truth for its own ends.