• Optional@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    It’s fun to think about all the shit the people who first came up with that idea went through.

    today he is most remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth (German: Kontinentalverschiebung).

    Alfred Wegener - his hypothesis was not accepted by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today’s model of plate tectonics

    Forty years of “you moron!” and “fuckin’ weirdo dweeb” to be proven right in a major shift of academic thinking. And he wasn’t even the first to think of it - anyone folding a map back in the days probably had a similar thought. But. The rigid nature of what is allowed to be a fact was . . uh . . different. Then.