The Ocean of Truth: A Personal History of Global Tectonics

by Henry William Menard

Overview

Menard begins with the leading hypotheses (such as that the earth expands) and the supporting evidence for each. He traces the crucial work of the 1960s year by year as researchers debated hypotheses in correspondence and at frequent meetings. Throughout the book Professor Menard considers the implications of his story for the sociology of science and the goals of scientific research.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691610320
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Series in Geology and Paleontology , #63
Pages:	394
Sales rank:	696,076
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

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The Ocean of Truth

A Personal History of Global Tectonics

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By Henry William Menard

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08414-5

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CHAPTER 1

THE DUST ON HESS'S SLATE

Revolutions are painful but they become necessary when the old order no longer makes sense. That was true in geology after World War II. There was no agreement about the most fundamental properties of the earth. Was it cooling, heating, or staying at a constant temperature? Was it contracting, expanding, or retaining its size? Did the interior convect? Did continents drift? No geologist knew for sure. Nor, with the tools and techniques of the past, was there any way to know. Only a scientific revolution could solve the stagnation in geology, but where would it start and when? As it happened it started at sea.

With the Midpac expedition of 1950 the new marine geology was fairly launched and the coming tectonic revolution became inevitable. The first campaign of the revolution had been fought to a stalemate. The dream of drifting continents, which sprang fully formed from the brain of Lt. Alfred Wegener during a long recuperation from war wounds in the First World War, was untestable with the geological tools available before World War II. The revolution sputtered along for decades with episodic sniping from the academic trenches. In 1950 the first generation of the new marine tools was assembled: echo sounders, magnetometers, temperature probes, explosion seismometers, piston corers, and dredges. Within five years they would be adequate to discover the magnetic anomalies that take the measure of all the world, the great fracture zones that offset them, and the median rift where the sea floor is born. Meanwhile the cadres and tools for other phases of the revolution were being assembled. It would also be five years before the "paleomagicians" began to revive continental drift and double that time before the conjunction of precise isotopic dating and extensive magnetic sampling proved that the earth's magnetic field reverses frequently. Nonetheless paleomagnetic studies were about to begin. So was the new seismology — triggered by efforts to detect clandestine tests of nuclear weapons — that would verify transform faults and track the plunging lithosphere. All was ready to begin to end the revolution, but the campaign would be long. The wunderkinder, Morgan, McKenzie, and Parker, who would invent plate tectonics, were still schoolboys. Of the principal characters in this history, probably only Teddy Bullard, who learned it long before when he himself was a schoolboy, knew of Euler's theorem in 1950. Ultimately it was not geology or physics but a theorem proposed by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler two centuries earlier that provided the linchpin of plate tectonics.

Both the written and the orally reported memory of the development of scientific ideas can be remarkably misleading. Generally an idea evolves because new data require a revision. Then, to a working scientist, in contrast to a philosopher or historian, the old idea has no value and is erased from memory. After a decade or two a vigorous creative scientist might sometimes be questioned about an idea he has long since abandoned and must ask the questioner why he ever entertained the idea. For example, I once pointed out to Harry Hess that what he was telling me was incompatible with what he had published a scant two years earlier. Having forgotten, he expressed some surprise but more indignation, claiming he was in no way responsible for ideas made obsolete by new data. Thus the only certain way to know what Hess wrote was to read it rather than to ask him. On the other hand scientific papers are rarely explicit about the broad questions to which the described research is related. The basic purpose is assumed to be obvious, so to understand why most papers are written we must put them in the context of current theories. In this respect the author of the paper can be of some help.

The most difficult fact to establish is what background information a scientist had when he started his research. The paper itself ordinarily leads one to believe that the author was one day reading a scientific journal and it occurred to him to conduct some research based on his reading. The citations credit, and references identify, all the previous work that the scientist had digested before he began his own contribution. However, few research scientists seem to function in this way. I, for example, tend to get ideas while walking along the beach in La Jolla, and if I cannot think of a test I brood about it. If I can test, I immediately do so by whatever means, crude or refined, are at hand. Barring an immediate test, I might phone a colleague to outline the problem and ask if she had solved it or knew of a solution — thereby saving me the effort. I can't think of a time when I went to a library seeking a solution to a hypothesis. I have queried many productive scientists in rapidly advancing fields, and they all seem to work in this way. In part this is because, within their own specialties, they know most of the literature. I suspect, however, that the main reason for this behavior is that it is more exciting to conceive and test an idea than to read about one. Perhaps another reason is that scientists are not always easy to understand; "it is easier to rediscover Gibbs than to read him."

When a scientist publishes, the circumstances usually change. The whole fabric of science consists of linkages to past work, and so after the fact the researcher repairs to the library to find what has been published on a subject. Often one scientist (A) realizes that a bit of apparently isolated research published by another scientist (B) is part of a newly significant body of work. Scientist B of course did not realize this, but A dutifully cites B, and later a third scientist (C) cites B as the real discoverer of A's work.

Another problem for a historian of science arises from what Robert K. Merton calls the "Matthew effect," citing the Gospel according to St. Matthew:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

The effect presumably applies to all kinds of activities that involve public recognition. When a distinguished actor is reduced by age to a secondary role, we still associate his name with a movie when we have forgotten that of the young star. In science the Matthew effect creates much confusion and, as with aspiring actors, makes it difficult for a young scientist to achieve recognition. For example, an established scientist (E) often receives a reprint from a young scientist (Y) who is unknown to him but who cites his work. Often Y, a graduate student, is the first author of a paper that has as a second author his professor (P) who is well known to E because they work on the same subjects. That is in fact why Y is citing E's work. The established scientist will remember the paper because it is his subject, but what is he to do with the reprint? If E files it alphabetically under "Y" he is in danger of losing track of it because he will not remember Y's name. Thus it is filed under "P." The problem for the historian of science is that the established scientist who is likely to be interviewed may innocently remember the research and the noted second author and completely forget the first author who did most of the work. The effect is so strong for Nobel Prize winners that some of them stop publishing jointly with young colleagues even though they collaborated in the research.

The Matthew effect sometimes has the curious result that the more famous scientists who were established in a field when a discovery was made may be less reliable sources for a historian than the students who came after the discovery. The students are assigned papers to read, and thus they know the names and order of the authors. As to the established scientists, an example of the Matthew effect will appear in Chapter 5 in connection with the discovery of fracture zones.

At best it is difficult to reconstruct the evolution of one idea from another, but most scientists try to lay down some sort of pro forma trail in the form of references. They at least go to the library after they finish the research and cite the papers as though they had read them in advance. Therein lies normal polite behavior. To fail to cite known work is dishonest. To tell the truth — namely, that the research was independent of the cited references — smacks of an unseemly concern for priorities. Indeed, if the library shows that the idea and tests have already been published, the proper procedure is to shrug it off and wait for another idea. Some of the most fruitful and imaginative scientists, however, further cloud the evolution of ideas by disdaining the postresearch visit to the library. Albeit Einstein was particularly casual about reading the literature even at the start of his career. Consider the following excerpt translated from a paper in 1906 when he was 27:

It seems to me to be in the nature of the subject, that what is to follow might already have been partially clarified by other authors. However, in view of the fact that the questions under consideration are treated here from a new point of view, I believed I could dispense with a literature search which would be very troublesome for me, especially since it is to be hoped that other authors will fill this gap, as was commendably done by Herr Planck and Herr Kaufmann on the occasion of my first paper on the principle of relativity.

Few scientists expect the likes of Max Planck to tidy up for them, but more than one of the principals in the tale that follows had an attitude about the literature not unlike Einstein's, and that poses problems. Harry Hess was always generous with acknowledgments of critiques and discussions and praise for his colleagues' work, but his formal citations were rare. It was my impression that he wrote most of his papers on trains and trans-Atlantic airplanes and cited mainly from memory. His attitude in his seminal "Drowned Ancient Islands of the Pacific" is an interesting variation on Einstein's reason for not visiting the library:

Since it is difficult to discuss any theory of origin of guyots against the background of misconception and ill-founded theories which at present confound geologic literature on ocean basins and the Pacific Basin in particular, the writer proposes to wipe the slate clean and start on a new basis.

Guyots are the drowned ancient islands. Hess here gives a splendid illustration of how complex the evolution of ideas can be. He did not cite Darwin's Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs of 1842, but it is hardly conceivable that he had not read that classic book and accepted its proposed origin of atolls by submergence. Yet Darwin notes an elementary corollary that if volcanoes sink in the tropics to become atolls, they must also sink in high latitudes to become drowned rocky platforms. Hess had merely confirmed Darwin, but he apparently had wiped the message off the slate. Can we be sure that he had no residual memory? E. L. Hamilton, as careful a scholar as conscience can conceive, read Darwin and made no note of this point. I edited a reprint of Darwin's book and wrote about guyots for 30 years before noting the point. We all must have read it, but this crucial argument in one of the best known books by one of the real giants of science had no influence on thinking about guyots for over three decades. Or did it?

The evolution of scientific ideas is further complicated by the frequency of independent discoveries in science. These are almost inevitable simply because of the nature of science. At any given time, published data and interpretations are ready to lead to further advances in science. The only question is who will first identify the advance. Considering the delays in publication, several people may be expected to make simultaneous discoveries before the work of one of them receives recognition. Scientists engaged in research and publication rarely read outside the current journals, so any idea that is lost from the current literature is more apt to be rediscovered than not.

The existence of this phenomenon is well known because of a few famous examples. Newton and Leibniz independently discovered the calculus, Darwin and Wallace independently discovered evolution, and so on. However, the frequency of the phenomenon is less appreciated. Merton, the pioneering sociologist of science, calls independent discoveries "multiples"; they may be simultaneous or spread out and may involve many people. He shows, for example, that the hypothesis of the existence of independent multiples in science and technology was itself independently discovered by at least 18 people between 1828 and 1922 when it came into general recognition. The discoverers included Macaulay, Francis Galton, Friedrich Engels, George Sarton, and Albert Einstein; Benjamin Franklin did not consider himself a discoverer because he thought everyone was familiar with the subject.

The unpublished notebooks of Cavendish and Gauss are full of findings that were later independently discovered and published by others. The phenomenon is so common that when Gauss, aged 18, discovered the method of least squares, it seemed so obvious to him that he assumed it was known. It was left to others to discover it three more times. It is hardly surprising that scientists have adopted institutional expedients to deal with the problem of priority. Since the seventeenth century, sealed and dated manuscripts have been deposited with scientific societies. Early minutes of the Royal Society state that

when any fellow should have a philosophical notion or invention, not yet made out, and desire that the same sealed up in a box might be deposited with one of the secretaries, till it could be perfected, and so brought to light, this might be allowed for the better securing inventions to their authors.

From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the curious practice also existed of reporting discoveries in anagrams. The more conventional presentation of an idea or observation in a short abstract has been widely used for centuries. It is especially popular now because abstracts of talks at professional meetings are published much faster than journal articles. Merton concludes,

These and comparable expedients all testify that scientists, even those who manifestly subscribe to the contrary opinion, in practice assume that discoveries are potential multiples and will remain singletons only if prompt action forestalls the later independent discovery.

Just so, the absence of prompt action by Harry Hess changed the concept of sea-floor spreading from a potential to an actual multiple discovery by Dietz. Just so, the failure of Bruce Heezen to publish his ideas on a world-girdling rift for three years caused the discovery to be shared with Maurice Ewing. Just so, the fact that Jason Morgan gave the first talk on plate tectonics in 1967 is obscured by the fact that his discovery came after he had already submitted an abstract on a different subject. Ideas develop rapidly during a scientific revolution. Discoveries are in the air. Many occur simultaneously.

Biographical memoirs provide another useful source of historical information, and in some respects the historian of science is relatively fortunate. A sizable fraction of the scientists of historical interest are elected to the Royal Society of London, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, or some other national equivalent. In due course they become the subjects of biographical memoirs 10 or 20 pages long, usually including complete bibliographies. Moreover, all scientists are members of professional societies such as the Geological Society of London or of America, and these societies also publish such memoirs of prominent members. In earlier times they were lengthy, but as membership has grown they have shrunk to little more than half-page obituaries. Even so, there is rarely a problem in determining vital statistics and professional achievements of scientists who have died.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Ocean of Truth by Henry William Menard. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO H. W. MENARD, pg. vii
• CONTENTS, pg. ix
• ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. xi
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• Chapter 1. THE DUST ON HESS’S SLATE, pg. 1
• Chapter 2. THE DREAM OF A GREAT POET, pg. 17
• Chapter 3. I KEEP MY SHIPS AT SEA, pg. 30
• Chapter 4. FINDING SMOOTHER PEBBLES, pg. 44
• Chapter 5. DISCOVERY OF FRACTURE ZONES AND SEA-FLOOR PROVINCES, pg. 56
• Chapter 6. DISCOVERY AND USE OF MYSTERIOUS MAGNETIC ANOMALIES, pg. 70
• Chapter 7. MEANWHILE DRIFTING ASHORE, pg. 80
• Chapter 8. DISCOVERY OF MEDIAN RIFT, pg. 94
• Chapter 9. BLUE WATER, GREEN ROCK: THE ADMIRAL’S MANTLE, pg. 108
• Chapter 10. OCEANIC TRENCHES, pg. 119
• Chapter 11. THE SEQUENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OF RIDGES, pg. 132
• Chapter 12. THE EXPANDING EARTH, pg. 142
• Chapter 13. SEA-FLOOR SPREADING, pg. 152
• Chapter 14. 1960, pg. 162
• Chapter 15. 1961-1962 THE REVOLUTION BEGINS, pg. 175
• Chapter 16. 1963-1964 INCREASING TENSION, pg. 190
• Chapter 17. 1963-1964 MAGNETIC REVERSALS AND THE VINE-MATTHEWS HYPOTHESIS, pg. 212
• Chapter 18. 1963-1964 CONTINENTAL DRIFT, pg. 223
• Chapter 19. 1965 SEA-FLOOR SPREADING CONFIRMED, pg. 238
• Chapter 20. 1966 CONVERSION OF THE INVOLVED, pg. 256
• Chapter 21. THE OCEAN OF TRUTH, pg. 281
• EPILOGUE, pg. 295
• ABSTRACT OF CHRONOLOGY LOGARITHMIC SCALE, pg. 303
• NOTES, pg. 305
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 327
• INDEX, pg. 341