It’s easy to take for granted the wealth of knowledge we have today.  Today’s third graders today know more about our Universe than the educated elite of the Renaissance – and so many of us know so much more than today’s third graders!  So many of our Ancestors would have paid any price imaginable for even just a tiny slice of the knowledge we take for granted today.

It’s hard to overstate how incredible this is.  So many basic facts of our world – things we we learn and know at an early age – are things that so many of our Ancestors wondered about their whole lives.  Questions like “what holds up the moon?”, “why does the Sun shine?”, “What are stars?”,  “Why do children look like their parents?”, “What does my heart accomplish?”, and so many more.  Most of the questions like this were unanswerable quite recently – say, when our great great grandparents’ great great grandparents’ great great grandparents were born.  I’m reminded of this often, and remind myself of it – it’s an awesome source of joy for me, especially as Samhain approaches.  Hence, it’s fitting that the flagship journal of science – the journal Nature – just published the obituary of Dr. Morgan, who played a central role in giving us our understanding of another one of these basic understandings of our world – the theory of plate tectonics!  His transformative gift to us has been compared to Darwin’s gift of our understanding of evolution:

“Jason Morgan, the physicist, was to geology what Darwin, the geologist, was to biology — towering figures with probing minds, who became synonymous with the paradigm shifts they engendered,”  – Frederik Simons, associate chair of the Princeton University Department of Geosciences

Of course, like so many fields of scientific knowledge, many more people than just one built our modern understanding.  The first recognition that Africa and South America seem to fit together like a puzzle dates back at least to 1596, and Alfred Wegner made a major push for accepting “continental drift”, even publishing a book on it in 1915 – long before Jason Morgan was even born.  But without a mechanism or even a way it might happen, the idea struggled for acceptance.  After Wegner’s death, the hard work of many scientists (Dr.s Tuzo Wilson, Edward Bullard and Xavier Le Pichon among them) continued to accumulate evidence for it, and possible mechanisms, slowing gaining acceptance for the idea.  An abrupt turning point of a gradual process is always a bit subjective (and a bit fictional anyway), but many have suggested that Jason Morgan’s presentation on his proposed plate tectonics to the 1967 American Geophysical Union meeting marked the start of modern plate tectonics.   Here is an excerpt from that Nature obituary:

He interpreted chains of volcanoes in terms of poles and plate rotation, a spectacular example being the Hawaiian Island chain of volcanoes. An abrupt bend in the chain near Midway Island indicates that the adjacent plates had reorganized about 40 million years ago.

Morgan proposed that these volcanic chains were tracks — when hot upwellings in the mantle (called plumes) approach the surface, they trigger volcanism in the plate above it. As the plate moves, linear chains of volcanoes are produced. Because the plumes don’t move much, the history of plate motion can be inferred from these tracks. Morgan also made computer models — an innovative approach at the time — that compared where the tracks should be theoretically to where they were geologically. All the evidence was consistent with rigid plates moving over a fixed set of plumes.

Perspective

Did you hear of his death anywhere?   Was this a lead story any major news outlet?  No.  I know that we have had important stuff (democracy in America was nearly lost, and is far from safe even now, after all) – but would even a few minutes every few months amid all the “reality” shows, football, and Tiktok been too hard to cover?  I don’t put all or even most of the blame on the media.  After all, this is capitalism – the media is driven by ratings, and hence they supply what they estimate people want.  I blame mostly our culture.  A culture that cares more about suppressing blacks who protest police brutality or are unhappy that Christmas isn’t forced on everyone more than it already is than about the tremendous growth in our understanding of our world, given to us by science, over the past century or two.

Can you imagine describing plate tectonics to one of your Ancestors from 5,000 years ago?  Even convincing her or him that the Earth is not flat, and that Earth is internally heated by radioactivity (or even that most people really don’t have to worry where the next meal is coming from, or that some people have automatically heating houses) would be hard enough, even before the science of geology or what the heck “radioactivity” even is?   But no, with all that astounding wonder, even the death of a major contributor to our understanding of our planet gets barely a whisper in our culture, and most people won’t know it happened, if they would even care.  Still, I don’t see this as something to be discouraged about, but rather a reminder of how vital, how massively important, our work together in building a reality based culture of wonder and awe, is.

I don’t have my Samhain rituals fully planned yet – but I’m sure that Dr. Morgan will be included in them, in calling to both our Ancestors and future generations.

The Author: Jon Cleland Host

Starstuff, Contemplating: We are assemblages of ancient atoms forged in stars – atoms organized by history to the point of consciousness, now able to contemplate this sacred Universe of which we are a tiny, but wondrous, part.

Dr. Jon Cleland Host is a scientist who earned his PhD in materials science at Northwestern University & has conducted research at Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning since 1997.  He holds eight patents and has authored over three dozen internal scientific papers and eleven papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the journal Nature.  He has taught classes on biology, math, chemistry, physics and general science at Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University.  Jon grew up near Pontiac, and has been building a reality-based spirituality for over 30 years, first as a Catholic and now as a Unitarian Universalist, including collaborating with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow to spread the awe and wonder of the Great Story of our Universe (see www.thegreatstory.org, and the blog at evolutionarytimes.org).  Jon and his wife have four sons, whom they embrace within a Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality.  He currently moderates the yahoo group Naturalistic Paganism.

See Starstuff, Contemplating posts.

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