| Summary: | In 1912 a German Meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, took the drastic step of moving into another science altogether by publishing the shocking geologic theory that our continents have been sailing across the surface of the earth like leaves on a lake blown by—what? The geologists laughed at the suggestion of an impossible wind and scorned the man who had insolently crossed the boundaries of the sciences. But truth be told, it wasn’t unheard of in those early years to do just that. Rutherford, a physicist, had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Marie Curie had already won twice, once in physics and once in chemistry. Wegener himself had done his PhD work in astronomy before switching over to meteorology, and at the same time was a renowned arctic explorer. The separation between the sciences are useful and real—a biology student has enough to learn without spending years on tensor analysis or relativity— but at their boundaries they blur. Today nearly everyone pays lip service to what we call interdisciplinary research, but in practice they fight hard against it. I did my PhD course work in the chemistry department of the University of Florida and my research in the physics group at Oak Ridge, then had a postdoc appointment in the chemistry department at Brookhaven before going to physics at Cornell and ending up in geology at Miami, but I had to fight along the way. A chemistry professor at Florida tried to insist that I take his colloid course instead of relativity (which was taught at the same time). I won that fight but lost at Cornell when I tried to have my students take chemistry courses instead of the required engineering and physics courses. The fact that Wegener wasn’t a geologist gave them an easy way out: it’s easier to laugh at new ideas than to confront them, and easier still to laugh at new ideas from those whom you can consider amateurs.
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