Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [76]
Though scientists like to hold up Copernicus as a researcher who was obviously right, his golden idea – that the Earth goes round the Sun – was widely rejected by his scientific peers. Tycho Brahe, a giant of astronomy in Copernicus’s later years, was among those who chose to ignore the heliocentric model. Then there are Isaac Newton and Friedrich Gauss, who both waited twenty years for recognition and acceptance of their radical ideas. A full thirty-five years passed before Newton’s own university was willing to teach his work.
Jonathan Swift once said that ‘When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.’ That was certainly the case for Alfred Wegener, the man who proposed a theory of continental drift decades before we had any understanding of plate tectonics. Wegener had noted that various coastlines – notably the Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa – would fit together well if not separated by the ocean. The geology also seemed to span the water: mountain ranges and other features would continue across the divide. While reading in a library in Marburg, Germany, Wegener had come across the curious fact that the fossil records of South America and Africa shared common specimens. The evidence was not conclusive, but, taken all together, it looked persuasive. ‘A conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind,’ he later wrote.
In 1912, Wegener presented his idea to a meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt. He proposed that in the distant past the Earth’s continents had been joined together in a super-continent, later named Pangaea. The continents had subsequently ‘drifted’ apart. The idea was summarily dismissed by geologists. In 1926, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists even organised a special symposium to denounce Wegener’s hypothesis. It had a lasting effect: until the early 1960s, continental drift was regarded as a crazy idea. Then the right technology arrived in scientists’ hands, and Wegener was exonerated.
During the Second World War, the Allies had constructed magnetic maps of the sea floor in an effort to track German submarines. By the 1960s, scientists were able to use those maps – and the mapping equipment – to examine the nature of the Earth’s crust. They discovered that the Earth’s crust consists of a jigsaw of huge interlocking plates, all riding on the semi-molten layer below, and slowly moving in relation to one another. At a meeting of the Royal Society in 1964, scientists pronounced continental drift to be the new orthodoxy. By the mid-1960s, you could not get a paper published that did not embrace Wegener’s hypothesis. Sadly, by then Wegener had been dead for more than thirty years.
John James Waterston’s recognition was similarly slow and posthumous. In 1843 he came up with a description of the behaviour of gases that was a forerunner of the now standard kinetic theory of gases. When he submitted it to the Royal Society for peer review, Sir John Lubock described it as ‘nothing but nonsense’. It was forty-five years before Waterston’s contribution was recognised.
Sometimes, though, decades spent in the wilderness being scorned and insulted by colleagues are eventually rewarded. Barbara McClintock, for example, had been dismissed by one prominent geneticist as ‘just an old bag who’d been hanging around Cold Spring Harbor for years’. How sweet it must have been, then, when she won a Nobel Prize in 1983 in recognition of work she had carried out – and been utterly derided for – nearly forty years earlier.
McClintock’s discovery is reflected in newspaper headlines across the world. If we had paid attention to