Chapter 20: Model comparison

Miscellaneous Comments

p. 613, first paragraph of section 20.5: [Comment by Nick Cox.] The juxtaposition of Wegener and Jeffreys here is accidentally bizarre. Wegener's ideas of continental drift are now seen as a precursor of modern plate tectonics, which is no longer controversial. But for many years a leading objection to those ideas was Jeffreys's insistence that there was no physically possible mechanism for the process postulated (which does differ from what is now accepted). With perfect hindsight, therefore, Jeffreys backed the wrong horse here, despite his other outstanding contributions to geophysics.