Alfred Wegener's Work in Paleoclimatology

这个项目将为阿尔弗雷德·韦格纳写一本科学传记，他是德国极地科学家和气象学家，以大陆漂移理论的创始人而闻名。该项目将用韦格纳的一生和工作来解释地球科学在20世纪上半叶的演变。该项目将努力证明，大陆漂移理论并不是一些人可能认为的由局外人提出的叛逆想法，而是一位主流科学家提出的主流假说，并基于广泛使用的数据集。此外，国际和平研究所将表明，关于韦格纳理论的辩论最好被视为地球科学家为寻找如何最好地组织大量经验数据而做出的建设性的集体努力。这是韦格纳本人会赞同的一个想法，因为他认为科学是一种社会企业，在时间尺度上的演变比个人的科学生涯要长得多。

This project will produce a scientific biography of Alfred Wegener, the German polar scientist and meteorologist best known as the originator of the theory of continental drift. The project will use Wegener's life and work to explain the evolution of earth sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. The project will endeavor to show that the theory of continental drift was not a renegade idea proposed by an outsider, as some might believe, but instead was a mainstream hypothesis proposed by a mainstream scientist and based on widely- used data sets. Further, the PI will show that the debate about `Wegener's theory` is best seen as a constructive, communal effort by earth scientists to find how best to organize a vast fund of empirical data. This is an idea Wegener himself would have endorsed, since he viewed science as a social enterprise evolving on a time scale much longer than an individual scientific career.