Alfred Wegener's Work in Paleoclimatology

该项目将为阿尔弗雷德·韦格纳（Alfred Wegener）撰写一本科学传记。韦格纳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。该项目将使用韦格纳的生活和工作来解释20世纪上半叶地球科学的演变。该项目将努力表明，大陆漂移理论并非像有些人认为的那样，是一个局外人提出的叛逆想法，而是一个主流科学家提出的主流假设，并以广泛使用的数据集为基础。此外，PI将表明，关于“韦格纳理论”的辩论最好被视为地球科学家寻找如何最好地组织大量经验数据的建设性共同努力。韦格纳本人也赞同这一观点，因为他认为科学是一项社会事业，其发展时间远长于个人科学事业。

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.