The church and the state are not necessarily the only ones fighting new scientific ideas. Ever heard of Alfred Wegener?
"The hypothesis that the continents had once formed a single landmass before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations was first presented by Alfred Wegener to the German Geological Society on 6 January 1912. Although Wegener's theory was formed independently and was more complete than those of his predecessors, Wegener later credited a number of past authors with similar ideas. Wegener was the first to use the phrase "continental drift".
But at the time Wegener introduced his theory, the scientific community firmly believed the continents and oceans to be permanent features on the Earth's surface. Not surprisingly, his proposal was not well received, even though it seemed to agree with the scientific information available at the time. A fatal weakness in Wegener's theory was that it could not satisfactorily answer the most fundamental question raised by his critics: What kind of forces could be strong enough to move such large masses of solid rock over such great distances? Wegener suggested that the continents simply plowed through the ocean floor, but Harold Jeffreys, a noted English geophysicist, argued correctly that it was physically impossible for a large mass of solid rock to plow through the ocean floor without breaking up. Undaunted by rejection, Wegener devoted the rest of his life to doggedly pursuing additional evidence to defend his theory. He froze to death in 1930 during an expedition crossing the Greenland ice cap, but the controversy he spawned raged on. However, after his death, new evidence from ocean floor exploration and other studies rekindled interest in Wegener's theory, ultimately leading to the development of the theory of plate tectonics."
Always tough being a prophet, hindsight is better than foresight, etc., etc. |
