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Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth, by James Lawrence Powell
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1211873 in Books
- Published on: 2014-12-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.30" h x 6.10" w x 9.10" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
What History Teaches Us about Scientific Consensus
By David Morrison
Jim Powell has written a welcome history of some of the most important and contentious ideas in science. Almost everyone has heard of the topics he analyzes: the age of the Earth and Moon, plate tectonics, the discovery that the Earth and Moon have been battered by cosmic impacts, the impact extinction of the dinosaurs, and global warming. While these basic concepts are widely accepted by scientists, there are still influential members of the public (like politicians who love to expose their ignorance by answering questions with “I am not a scientist”) who oppose them. Powell has written a lively history of these ideas, and this book provides a welcome window into the basics of modern geosciences.
This book is more than a good read; Powell has an important message for us. He uses the sometimes tortured history to explore the basic questions of how scientists decide what is correct – not absolute truth, which is never possible, but at least a consensus with a high level of confidence. This is not a pretty history, with many wrong turns and quite a few villains who refused to believe evidence that undercut their own pet ideas. When the deniers held senior positions in universities or government agencies, they were able to block progress for as much as a generation. One motivation was an inherent distrust of outsiders, especially the arrogant physicists who questioned the geological consensus. Another important factor in the first two case studies was the very small numbers of scientists who where working in a given field, and the absence of real data with which to test theories. In the second half of the twentieth century, there are many more researchers, equipped with marvelous facilities and aided by powerful computers, and communication among them is far easier than in the past. Yet at a major international conference on lunar geology held shortly before the Apollo landing, there was still virtual unanimity among those present that the lunar craters were volcanic and impacts had played little if any role in lunar history.
The most provocative discussion in Powell’s book concerns climate change and global warming. The basics of the greenhouse effect and the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide in determining surface temperatures were established a century ago, and by the 1970s a consensus was beginning to emerge about the role of industrial pollution in raising temperatures. By the 1990s the direct evidence for global warming was pouring in, and today it is impossible to deny the reality of large-scale climate change. But “scientific consensus” is a tricky concept. In his earlier examples, Powell documented cases of consensus in other areas of the geosciences that persisted for decades and then were overthrown by new discoveries, sometimes coming from other fields of science. Powell asks the important question whether this current consensus is any more durable than some of the widely held misconceptions of the past. This is our conundrum when we find ourselves in the midst of a scientific revolution. Does heresy in science always give way to truth, as implied in the subtitle to this book? And how do we know when we have it right with enough confidence to take action to save ourselves from possible planetary catastrophe.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Why we aren't farther ahead
By David Wineberg
One of the many great things about Four Revolutions is that it jumps right in. There isn’t the endless groundwork and foundation building of so many such efforts. It is captivating right off the top. Being the history of discovering how the Earth works, it is intuitive and has universal appeal. Its cast of miscreants and creatives makes it colorful. And Powell has a terrific knack for harpooning just the right keywords for the titles and subtitles, along with dramatic endings for sections.
The four revolutions are:
-determining the age of rocks and the Earth
-continental drift
-meteorite impacts on the moon, and dinosaur extinction here
-global warming
While the first is a quite civil disagreement among natural philosophers (as scientists were called), the second gets into vicious mudslinging, as scientists use ad hominem attacks on each other to denigrate their theories, their qualifications and even their personalities. Continental drift had all the appeal of forced abortion to American scientists in the first half of the last century. It is astonishing how they wielded their ignorance as if it were unimpeachable truth, and accused each other of being unqualified quacks. Rather than consider a new theory, they would conjure absurd patches to paper over faults in their own work. They worked to banish the printing of references in textbooks, or even the names of the perpetrators. They refused to cite competitors in their papers. It has of course, been this way for centuries.
Global warming is the most obnoxious story. It was theorized in the late 1800s. “Greenhouse Effect” was coined in 1913. And the issue has been proven again and again and again since. However, certain fossil fuel giants as well as conservatives have spent millions to counter the science. In Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security, Janine Wedel cites studies that of the more than one thousand books published on the topic, maybe 25 deny it. 72% of those denial books have a verifiable link to (conservative) “think tanks”, and 40% of those were written or edited by people with NO relevant scientific credentials. Yet that is what is holding up the whole planet from taking action, as the media repeatedly focus on the deniers in order to be “balanced”. Powell says there is no balance. This is settled science.
You can see the same process underway in geology today. The astrophysicist Marvin Herndon has disproven (not theorized, but disproved, which Powell says is far more difficult) convection as the motor of continental drift. He has postulated a unified theory in which all planets began as gas giants like Jupiter, and that particles rained in from the gas clouds over billions of years to produce the rock cores we call planets. His Maverick's Earth and Universe is both inspiring and sad. Sad to see the entire scientific community actively ignore this theory, and refuse to cite it, just as Powell describes in Four Revolutions.
These are most worthy reads. Four Revolutions is a fascinating record of small minds obfuscating big issues for personal gain.
David Wineberg
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
The weight of evidence...
By FictionFan
In the introduction, Powell tell us he was inspired to write this book when a friend, discussing the fact that the vast majority of scientists accept that the activities of man are contributing to global warming, remarked that scientists have been wrong before. Accepting the undeniable truth of that, Powell decided to look at the recent history of four important theories in earth sciences, showing that though scientists may have been wrong at first, they "eventually came to be right".
"The history of the four discoveries confirms the cardinal virtue of science: it is self-correcting. Scientists pushing the boundaries of knowledge are often wrong, but they do not stay wrong."
Considering the fair amount of depth Powell goes into on each of his subjects, the book is surprisingly accessible to the non-scientists among us. I found I only got lost occasionally and, when reading books like this, I accept that there are things that are too complex to simplify down to my level! In each section Powell starts at a point before the theory he is discussing was developed, explaining the existing state of knowledge and supposition. He then introduces us to the scientists who contributed to the development of the new theory, along with those who opposed it, and finally to those who 'proved' it. He provides little anecdotes of their lives, or their friendships or quarrels with each other, which prevent the book from becoming too dry a read.
There are two types of enjoyable popular science books as far as I'm concerned - those that clearly explain something and convince me of it, and those that clearly explain something and provoke me to argue with the author's conclusions. This one falls firmly into the latter category. Oddly, I started out a fairly firm believer in all four (five really, or six if you include the extinction of the dinosaurs) of the theories in the book, and ended up only fully convinced of two - or two and a half at a push. Throughout, Powell is critical of scientists who accepted theories and held onto them despite lack of proof or even once discoveries had been made that clearly invalidated them. But I felt Powell fell into that same trap himself too often, claiming a thing as being so when in fact the proof isn't yet there. The very subtitle of the book - From Heresy to Truth - is a prime example of this. His basic position seems contradictory - that scientists of old were stubborn and foolhardy to stand by their theories without adequate proof but that we should accept the theories of current science, also often without final evidence of their validity. And he makes generalized statements that are clearly an expression of his opinion rather than of 'fact'...
"The discoveries from astronomy and earth science expose the infinitesimal standing of the human race in time and space. They force us to admit that we are the products of, and the potential victims of, random events."
Do they really? I would imagine that the billions of people who believe in some form of God might not feel forced to admit that. Indeed, Powell himself points out in the course of the book that even many scientists are willing to admit that science and religion can co-exist. But this is just one example - there were several occasions when I felt he expressed himself more forcefully than the evidence justified, or substituted opinion for fact.
However, despite finding I was treating his conclusions with some caution, I found the book interesting and informative, and felt that overall he more or less made his case. Perhaps had he been a little less ambitious to prove the rightness of so many current theories, he might have been more convincing overall. Here is a brief summary of the theories he discusses...
Deep Time
Powell shows how the assumed age of the Earth has changed over the last century or so, as scientists made discoveries - such as evolution - that negated the previous assumptions. As he does in each section, he highlights the scientists involved, including those who fought strongly to retain their existing position even when the evidence became overwhelming. He also points out that, in the end, it was physicists rather than geologists who made the most important discovery - how to determine the age of rocks through developing ways to measure radioactive decay.
My verdict (based on the info in the book): Not proven - an old Scottish verdict which means basically 'I believe it, but I don't think you've really proved it'. I admit the main reason for this verdict is that the stuff about radioactive decay went largely over my head - but it seemed to me that, as Powell described it, there were still too many assumptions involved for this to be a theory incapable of being overturned by further future discoveries.
Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics
In 1911, Alfred Wegener noticed that the east coast of South America was a great fit for the west coast of Africa, and speculated that they had once been joined. The then greats of the scientific world largely dismissed this idea, even when the fossil records between the two coasts showed a remarkable similarity. Powell takes us through all the experimentation that gradually proved the truth of the theory, as geologists speculated that continental drift and plate tectonics were the likely cause of mountain formation and of the mid-Atlantic ridge.
My verdict: Proven. With GPS, scientists have now been able to measure the rate of drift - that's the kind of proof I like!
Meteorite Impact
While discussing the theory that meteorites have impacted the Earth, on occasion with catastrophic results, I felt Powell got himself a bit side-tracked into both the extinction of the dinosaurs and the impact theory for the creation of the Moon.
My verdict - the jury is still debating. I don't think any of us who watched Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter some years back could doubt that major meteor strikes happen, nor be unconvinced of their catastrophic potential; and I was convinced of the evidence that they have happened here on Earth. However I felt Powell's certainty that this was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs was too strongly expressed - again, I tend to believe it, but don't think it has been 'proved'. And as for the Moon creation theory, even Powell had to admit that this one needs much more evidence before it moves from theory to fact.
Global Warming
So this is the crucial one - Powell's starting and finishing point. Although he refers to it as Global Warming, in fact the crux of his argument is proving that it's caused in large part by man's actions. Again this one got a bit 'sciency' for me, but for the most part I was able to follow the arguments.
My verdict: Proven. It seems to me the weight of measurable evidence - such as from atmospheric measurements over time showing the rapid rise in concentration of carbon dioxide to be almost exactly parallel with the increase in emissions - makes this one as close to proven as it's likely to be. And given the potential impact, I'd rather err on the side of caution anyway. But, although Powell's position is that this one is beyond doubt, he also makes it clear that estimates of the likely impact are still subject to debate. Personally, I feel we're probably safest to assume a worst-case scenario and act accordingly...and on that final note, I think Powell and I finally reached agreement.
An interesting book, despite Powell's occasional forays beyond the evidence, and one I would recommend to anyone who is still in doubt as to the reality of man's impact on the environment.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Columbia University Press.
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