Introduction
This is a book about the life and scientific work of Alfred Wegener, whose
reputation today rests with his theory of continental displacements, better
known as continental drift'. Wegener proposed this theory in 1912 and developed
it extensively for nearly 20 years. His book on the subject, The Origin of
Continents and Oceans, went through four editions and was the focus of an
international controversy in his lifetime and for some years after his death.
Wegener's basic idea was that many mysteries about the Earth's history could be
solved if one supposed that the continents moved laterally, rather than
supposing that they remained fixed in place. Wegener showed in great detail how
such continental movements were plausible and how they worked, using evidence
from a large number of sciences including geology, geophysics, paleontology, and
climatology. Wegener's idea – that the continents move - is at the heart of the
theory that guides Earth sciences today: namely plate tectonics. Plate tectonics
is in many respects quite different from Wegener's proposal, in the same way
that modern evolutionary theory is very different from the ideas Charles Darwin
proposed in the 1850s about biological evolution. Yet plate tectonics is a
descendant of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, in quite the same
way that modern evolutionary theory is a descendant of Darwin's theory of
natural selection.
When I started writing about Wegener's life and work, one of the most intriguing
things about him for me was that, although he came up with a theory on
continental drift, he was not a geologist. He trained as an astronomer and
pursued a career in atmospheric physics. When he proposed the theory of
continental displacements in 1912, he was a lecturer in physics and astronomy at
the University of Marburg, in southern Germany. However, he was not an
unknown. In 1906 he had set a world record (with his brother Kurt) for time
aloft in a hot-air balloon: 52 hours. Between 1906 and 1908 he had taken part in
a highly publicized and extremely dangerous expedition to the coast of northeast
Greenland. He had also made a name for himself amongst a small circle of
meteorologists and atmospheric physicists in Germany as the author of a
textbook, Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere (1911), and of a number of
interesting scientific papers.
As important as Wegener's work on continental drift has turned out to be, it was
largely a sideline to his interest in atmospheric physics, geophysics, and
paleoclimatology , and thus I have been at great pains to put Wegener's work on
continental drift in the larger context of his other scientific work, and in the
even larger context of atmospheric sciences in his lifetime. This is a
continental drift book only to the extent that Wegener was interested in that
topic and later became famous for it. My treatment of his other scientific work
is no less detailed, though I certainly have devoted more attention to the
reception of his ideas on continental displacement, as they were much more
controversial than his other work.
Readers interested in the specific detail of Wegener's career will see that he
often stopped pursuing a given line of investigation (sometimes for years on
end), only to pick it up later. I have tried to provide guideposts to his
rapidly shifting interests by characterizing different phases of his life as
careers in different sciences, which is reflected in the titles of the chapters.
Thus, the index should be a sufficient guide for those interested in a
particular aspect of Wegener's life but perhaps not all of it. My own feeling,
however, is that the parts do not make as much sense on their own as do all of
his activities taken together. In this respect I urge readers to try to
experience Wegener's life as he lived it, with all the interruptions, changes of
mind, and renewed efforts this entailed.
Wegener left behind a few published works but, as was standard practice, these
reported the results of his work – not the journey he took to reach that point.
Only a few hundred of the many thousands of letters he wrote and received in his
lifetime have survived and he didn't keep notebooks or diaries that recorded his
life and activities. He was not active (with a few exceptions) in scientific
societies, and did not seek to find influence or advance his ideas through
professional contacts and politics, spending most of his time at home in his
study reading and writing, or in the field collecting observations.
Some famous scientists, such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, left mountains of
written material behind, hundreds of notebooks and letters numbering in the tens
of thousands. Others, like Michael Faraday, left extensive journals of their
thoughts and speculations, parallel to their scientific notebooks. The more such
material a scientist leaves behind, the better chance a biographer has of
forming an accurate picture of how a scientist's ideas took shape and evolved.
I am firmly of the opinion that most of us, Wegener included, are not in any
real sense the authors of our own lives. We plan, think, and act, often with
apparent freedom, but most of the time our lives happen to us', and we only
retrospectively turn this happenstance into a coherent narrative of fulfilled
intentions. This book, therefore, is a story both of the life and scientific
work that Alfred Wegener planned and intended and of the life and scientific
work that actually happened to him'. These are, as I think you will soon see,
not always the same thing.
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