Alfred Wegener by Mott T. Greene

Author:Mott T. Greene [Greene, Mott T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Alfred, Else, and Hilde Wegener in June 1915, shortly before Alfred’s return to active service in the German Army. Photo courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven.

There was more to Wegener’s dispirited disinclination to work than just his impending return to military service. At the end of June Köppen had written him a long letter about the book on the displacement theory, having read through the proofs. Wegener was pleased, even delighted, that Köppen, who had always treated the work on displacement theory as a distracting sideline, had warmly approved it. But Wegener’s percipient guide and mentor had also raised a number of pointed questions about the manuscript, not least the inconsistent, confusing, and (finally) inconclusive treatment of oceanic deeps. Wegener had been persuaded by his discussions with Cloos to include something about these interesting features on the outside of the great island arcs of the western Pacific, even though he could not give a convincing explanation of them. Now that Köppen had asked for details, he found that he could give none. Moreover, the existence of the Peru-Chile Trench, pointed out by Köppen, 8 kilometers (5 miles) deep and 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) long, on the leading edge of the South American continent made nonsense of the explanation that such trenches were somehow connected with the creation of island arcs springing away from the trailing edge of a continent. Why had he not seen this before?

Wegener held onto Köppen’s letter for several weeks before replying. He expressed delight at the approval and thanked him for his comments, and he admitted his inability to explain ocean trenches in any greater detail (“the whole thing is still not clear to me”). His reflection went much deeper than this, however: “I think, by the way, that it is a weakness of all my work that I am forever going into too many side issues. I managed to cut out many of them from this book, but I should have limited myself to an even greater extent to the straightforward establishment of the displacements. Now we’ll just have to wait to see how it is received. We can scarcely expect much discussion as long as the war lasts.”114

Wegener’s rueful self-assessment in this letter strikes home. His book on thermodynamics and now this book on continental displacements had a tendency to lose central focus in an overly meticulous treatment of peripheral issues. By the time he had sent the proofs (in 1911) of the book on thermodynamics to Köppen, he had felt the need to apologize for incorporating a large number of physical speculations that they had not discussed. It was exactly these speculations and this miscellaneous character that Exner had savaged in his review of the book. Now he could see clearly that this same tendency had come to the fore again. This motif in his work was closely tied to the source of his enthusiasm, his thirst for novelty, and his pleasure in discovery. Moreover, it could also be linked to something

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.