NCGT, Issue 61, Dec 2011

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FACTS, THEORIES, BLIND COMMITMENTS AND SOCIO-DYNAMICS

Karsten M. STORETVEDT

Summary:

The history of the natural sciences is a narrative filled with an anarchic mix of facts, fictions, emotions and the struggle for prestige – including non-technical professional alienation, false play, bandwagonism, sociopolitical group pressure, national pride, immediate incentives, and the rest of non-relevant human peculiarities. Thus, one shouldn’t be too surprised that even the worst of accepted theories have had nine lives. This essay takes a quick look at the history of global tectonics – exemplifying its theoretical undecidedness and confusion that have progressed along with the flow of unexpected observational complexity. The essay pays particular attention to the resurrection of the old idea of continental drift, and its subsequent plate tectonics version, which in the late 1960s was heralded as a major break-through for understanding the structural evolution of the Earth’s crust. Nonetheless, guided by these once promising mobile concepts the alleged understanding of the Earth’s geological development is much more chaotic today than it ever was before. The geological sciences have apparently got stuck in a nonproductive deadlock. Necessary requirements for a next generation theoretical platform are suggested

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