In Annals of a Former World, John McPhee quotes a scientist about the plate tectonics revolution. In philosophy and in ordinary life also, some of us keep rearranging facts into new patterns, hoping to be "free and flying:"
From a letter by Tanya Atwater, a marine geologist, to Allan Cox: “Seafloor spreading was a wonderful concept because it could explain so much of what we knew, but plate tectonics really set us free and flying. It gave us firm rules so that we could predict what we should find in unknown places….From the moment the plate concept was introduced, the geometry of the San Andreas system was an obviously interesting example. The night Dan McKenzie and Bob Parker told me the idea, a bunch of us were drinking beer at the Little Bavaria in La Jolla. Dan sketched it on a napkin. ‘Aha!’ said I, ‘but what about the Mendocino trend?’ ‘Easy!’ and he showed me three plates. As simple as that! The simplicity and power of the geometry of those three plates captured my mind that night and has never let go since. It is a wondrous thing to have the random facts in one’s head suddenly fall into slots of an orderly framework. It is like an explosion inside. That is what happened that night and that I often felt happen to me and others as I was working out (and talking out) the geometry of the Western U. S. The best part of the plate business is that it has made us all start communicating. People who squeeze rocks and people who identify deep-sea nannofossils and people who map faults in Montana suddenly all care about each other’s work. I think I spend half my time just talking and listening to people from many fields, searching together for how it might all fit together. And when something does fall into place, there is that mental explosion and the wondrous excitement. I think the human mind must love order. Annals of a Former World, 134-135.
Posted by shea0017 at November 24, 2004 12:51 PM