GL Blockbusting, Doubt, and the Impossible
Geoscience
Type Quotes
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
-Antistenes
Doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.
-Richard Feynman
If there's something you really want to believe, That's what you should question the most.
-Penn Jillette
There is perhaps no beguilement more insidious and dangerous than an elaborate and elegant mathematical process built upon unfortified premises.
-Thomas C. Chamberlain,
responding to the claim of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) that the sun was not older than ten million years
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
-Charles Darwin
What we learn, instead of illuminating what we have still to learn, sometimes casts a mental shadow over it, rendering it less discernible and impelling us to ignore it.
-Wallace Pratt
Enter peer review. Recycled popular dogma breezes through, but new concepts displease challenged experts. It is difficult to publish, or get a grant for, work contrary to conventional wisdom because many reviewers, editors, and managers obstruct anything that conflicts with their beliefs.
-Warren B. Hamilton
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
-Leonardo daVinci
The ice is rafting up to a height of 10 or 15 feet in places, the opposing floes are moving against one another at the rate of about 200 yards per hour. The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf.
-Ernest Shackleton
“Global warming clearly is a problem, though not in the catastrophic terms of Al Gore’s movies or environmental alarmists,” said Shaviv. “Climate change has existed forever and is unlikely to go away. But CO2 emissions don’t play the major role. Periodic solar activity does.”
-Nir Shaviv
This sad state of affairs has not been brought on by lack of undiscovered oil in the ground--it is the result of a drastic decline in the industry's effort to locate undiscovered oil in the United States.
-Michel T. Halbouty,
geologist, 1966
You should know how many incompetent men I had to compete with - in vain!
-Inge Lehmann
You can hardly convince a man of error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.
-Henry David Thoreau
Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness.
-Samuel Warren Carey
What is scientific fact today may not be true tomorrow.:
-Willy Nelson, paraphrased by
Fred F. Meissner
The history of the art of prospecting is strewn with the wrecks of what were once called "ruling theories," many of which were accepted because they seemed to be so reasonable.
-Everette Lee DeGolyer
Do not expect to be hailed as a hero when you make your great discovery. More likely you will be a ratbag-maybe failed by your examiners. Your statistics, or your observations, or your literature study, or your something else will be patently deficient. Do not doubt that in our enlightened age the really important advances are and will be rejected more often than acclaimed. Nor should we doubt that in our own professional lifetime we too will repudiate with like pontifical finality the most significant insight ever to reach our desk.
-Samuel Warren Carey
Anyone who argues on the basis of authority does not exploit his insight but his memory.
-Leonardo daVinci
Begin by conditioning yourself to be restless and uneasy about the status quo. Don't overlook the familiar just because you've seen it so often.
-Jack Oliver
The most damaging phrase in the language is: `It's always been done that way.'
-Grace Hopper
