Comment by dylan604
7 days ago
Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.
My memory is the opposite: I recall learning that an asteroid impact was the most likely explanation, and the K-T boundary was the biggest piece of evidence, and the only problem was that they hadn’t discovered a candidate impact crater. And it wasn’t until the first decade of the 2000s that consensus started to emerge that the big crater in the Yucatán is the likely cause.
The pictures of the planets bit makes sense, as even with a telescope (through which we've seen the plants for a very long time) there's not really enough light for early film techniques to capture well.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
I had a teacher get in trouble for discussing plate tectonics in the 1990s, in a public school. Turns out it still upsets a lot of religious groups and also was tied to some peculiar schools of climate change denialists in the 90s. I still don't entirely know how denying plate tectonics was useful for climate change denial that decade, I just remember how weird it was for the teacher to suggest to forget a whole science lecture because people didn't want us to know it. Come to think of it, that probably also was around the time we watched Jurassic Park in class.
Did the Streisand Effect kick in making you (and/or other students) unable to forget it? "Whoa, teacher says to forget it, so I'm really going to remember it now!"
Come to think of it, if a teacher said to remember something because it will be on a test versus forget something because religious types are upset, I know I'd remember the thing I was just told to forget knowing it now would not be on a test. Then again, as a teen, I was really starting to question the religious part of my upbringing in light of science.
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That is wild, did they believe in this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diluvium
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plate tectonics is a good one. I definitely remember my mom telling me as a kid how South America and Africa look like they fit together, and my dad talking about Pangea being the name when the pieces were fit together. it wasn't until much later that I realized that my parents were not taught this in school, but my dad just kept up with current events much more. It is weird to think that something is so new that even your parents were not taught it.
Is the coastlines of South America and Africa looking like they fit together actually because of plate tectonics, or is it just a coincidence?
The shape we see for the coastlines of South America and Africa is affected by sea level. Depending on when you happened to look over the last say 140 million years sea level would have varied from around 135 meters below current sea level to around 75 meters above current sea level. That is a range of 210 meters.
Surely over that range both costs would change quite a bit, and I can't think of any mechanism that would make those changes complimentary in a way to keep the two coasts looking like they fit together.
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Obviously it will vary by location and age. But I was in high school in the early 80s, and plate tectonics & Pangea were already in our text books. (And in my country it takes forever for stuff to make it into textbooks.)
I don't recall there being any controversy about it - it was used as the basis for a number of topics in geography (Indian Subcontinent forming Himalayas, bio-diversity and gene relations in Biology etc.)
I suspect the real lesson here us that education is far from consistent both regionally, nationally and historically.
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it's still "just" a theory, in the same way gravitation is "just" a theory
and always will be until it's dis-proven, or someone invents a time machine and we can go and see it for ourselves
until it's dis-proven, or until it is proven.
we have plenty of evidence of the movement of plates. we know where subduction zones are. what does it take to prove a theory if not repeatable tests/observations?
the large body of corroborating evidence (and ability to be dis-proven) is what makes it a theory
but we can't "prove" plate tectonics, because we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years
in scientific nomenclature, a theory is a very robust thing indeed
vs. the vernacular, where it isn't, e.g. "I have a theory that my cat vomits behind the couch after I give him ice-cream"
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