Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist born in 1880, was an early proponent of continental drift. He hypothesized that a supercontinent slowly drifted apart to shape the Earth we know today. The idea was widely rejected by Wegener’s colleagues, but no scientific conclusion is final. Inquiries continued and the theory of plate tectonics became universally accepted by educated people.

Born in Mississippi and schooled at universities in Quebec and Florida, Daniel Galef writes in a variety of forms. The current edition of Scientific American offers one of his poems:

ALFRED WEGENER TO THE WORLD:

And yet it moves! Shh—hear the mountains murmur?
Peripatetic prairies slowly creep
across the globe.There is no terra firma.
Is that so terra-ble? We’ll have to keep
producing new and updated editions
of every atlas. But it’s no one’s fault
that continents collide, or split in fissions.
On groaning sleds of granite and basalt,
coastlines advance on trans-oceanic missions
like runners in the world’s most boring race
(though slow, they never fail to cover ground)
and somehow, still, their clip exceeds the pace
a stubborn academic comes around
to evidence, and changes his positions

A longtime friend pointed me to this delightful poem. He’s a reformed politico and semi-retired clergyman who has always had a dry sense of humour and a love of words. We have often shared drinks together. Nowadays, we’re tasting small servings of tea and coffee. Sixty years ago, the drinks were larger and stronger.

I’ve been an off and on subscriber of Scientific American for decades and my wife maintains a valued collection. We don’t understand everything the magazine publishes but it offers many opportunities to learn. Scientific American is now offering 90-days of digital access for a surprisingly low price. It might be the best $1 you’ve ever spent.

Articles that accompanied Galef’s poem in the November 2024 issue were particularly interesting.

One was The Dull Edge of Occam’s Razor, in which Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes successfully argues that the simplest explanation is often not the best one.

The second was Gifts from the Land. It discusses The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Indigenous writer and environmentalist Robin Wall Kimmerer. SA writer Meera Subramanian notes the book’s central question:

How can we better recognize the value of the natural world and build communities—and economies—that acknowledge such abundance?

The third piece was about procrastination. I plan to read that later.