When good ideas are not enough

In the 1700’s there was a puzzle: Why do we find marine fossils on the top of mountains? How in the world did they get there?

At the time science was often done by curious amateurs. People who had the money and the time to think about problems. One of those people was James Hutton.

James Hutton owned a farm, it was there that he noticed something important.

He knew soil was created when rocks were eroded. That soil was constantly being washed away by rain and carried by streams and rivers where it was redeposited in other places. What Hutton realised was if this process was repeated over and over again, the Earth would be completely flat.

And of course, it’s not.

So there had to be some other process that pushed up new mountains and hills to replace that which was eroded.

So Hutton thought there were fossils on mountains because some force had lifted mountains up and taken the fossils with them.

It would be 200 years later when we would fully understand this process of plate tectonics.

Today, people think of Hutton as the father of modern Geology. His ideas started a new field and forever changed how we understand the Earth. It was brilliant and revolutionary. And yet, he wasn’t recognised that way in his lifetime because few could understand a word he said.

In 1785 he wrote a paper about his ideas and presented it to the “Royal Society of Edinburgh”. People were baffled.

Here is a section from his paper:

”In the one case, the forming cause is in the body which is separated; for, after the body has been actuated by heat, it is by the reaction of the proper matter of the body, that the chasm which constitutes the vein is formed. In the other case, again,”

I know.

Even trained professionals couldn’t make sense of it.

Not put off, Hutton spent the next decade writing two volumes about his work. It ended up clocking in at around 2000 pages and was also utterly confusing. Almost half was written in French.

Here’s how Bill Bryson explained it:

“Hutton’s Theory of the Earth is a strong candidate for the least read important book in science (or at least would be if there weren’t so many others). Even Charles Lyell, the greatest geologist of the following century and a man who read everything, admitted he couldn’t get through it.”

Max Planck once said science advances one funeral at a time. And that’s true here.

When Huttson died In 1799, his friend John Playfair rewrote his work.

Playfair had two things going for him, he was a good writer and having been a good friend to Huttson for years, he was a rare person who often understood what Hutton was trying to say.

5 years later Playfair wrote a book that simplified Hutton’s ideas called “Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth”.

It’s thanks to that book that Huttson’s ideas could finally be spread.

Lesson: Good ideas don’t speak for themselves

Ideas are wonderful. But they are useless unless they are passed from one mind to another, where they can be accepted, critiqued, and built upon.

For ideas to be useful, they have to be explained clearly.

Source: A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Cheers,

Jared