in Mount Shasta, ley lines, and crystal healing. In addition to these individual topics, the first chapter provides a background to how science works and how scientists think so that we can better understand why science rejects these weird ideas. And the last chapter looks at the psychology of why people believe these weird things and what it implies for our future.
Of course, this book could be twice as long if I included nearly every topic that touches the earth in some way. There are lots of weird ideas about the weather (such as UFO clouds and chemtrails) that I have covered elsewhere, as well as auroras, ball lightning, the Tunguska explosion, and even conspiracies about humans controlling the weather, but these are largely outside the domain of geology. There are myths about aliens producing features on the landscape or creating crop circles, the Planet X/Nibiru idea, but those are largely covered in my book on UFOs and aliens.
Then there is the entire domain of apocalyptic beliefs and legends, and wild ideas about the end of the world, but debunking these is largely the domain of deconstructing religious prophecies and mistranslations of ancient Mayan inscriptions (as in the supposed end of the world back in 2000). These are not really about geology. Whenever these end-of-the-world scenarios mention actual geologic events, it’s just a mishmash of all sorts of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, storms) thrown together as a mechanism to end the world, not a serious misunderstanding of how these processes work.
In many of the chapters, I’ve tried to go beyond just debunking the claims and have added a section called “How Do We Know?” that outlines the scientific evidence for why science rejects the ideas in this book as crackpot and wrong. I feel that this is one of the most important things that a reader can take away from a book like this: not only knowing what is false but also understanding why we know it is false. Otherwise, much of what people learn about science is just memorizing facts and dogmatic assertions (a common problem in our K–12 science educations); as a result, students (and readers of this book) don’t understand or even hear the huge amount of evidence for why science rejects some ideas and accepts others. I hope readers will realize and appreciate that this is the most important thing they can learn from a book like this.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Ashley Runyon and Rachel Erin Rosolina at Indiana University Press for their interest and support of this project and Carol McGillivray for producing this book. I thank Sharon Hill and another anonymous reviewer for providing careful reviews of the chapters. I thank my wonderful sons, Erik, Zachary, and Gabriel, and my amazing wife, Dr. Teresa LeVelle, for their support and forbearance as I disappeared into my office for the entire Christmas vacation of 2018 to write this book.
weird earth
Science and Critical Thinking
The Science of the Earth
Like it or not, we all live in an age of science and technology. Science has utterly transformed the lives and fates not just of humans but of all organisms on the planet. Just look at what science has given us. Only 150 years ago, most children died in childbirth or through incurable childhood diseases. Today, thanks to modern medicine, nearly all children in the developed world survive their birth and early years. We take for granted that most of us carry a device in our pocket that is more powerful than a room-sized computer from only fifty years ago; it also performs as a phone, pager, clock, calculator, and video and audio player and has many other functions. Until the invention of the steam locomotive and then even faster transports, no human could travel any faster than a horse could run. Now we all routinely travel at 65 miles per hour on highways, and many people have flown and traveled faster than sound. Our lives are so completely dependent on the miracles of science and technology that we don’t even think about them anymore. We are aware of our dependence on them only when we lose them, such as during a power outage or an earthquake or other natural disaster.
Likewise, over the past two hundred years, the scientific method has been applied to the study of the earth, and its progress has led to great discoveries. We now know of millions of extinct animals that lived long before humans ever appeared. We can date rocks with high precision and can estimate the age of the origin of the earth and solar system at 4.56 billion years. We know what shapes the surface of the earth, what is beneath the surface, and how continents move around the earth’s surface. Instead of viewing earthquakes as a sign of the wrath of the gods, we understand what causes them and have made enormous strides in understanding and preparing for them, if not predicting them. Modern society runs on coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium, as well as valuable materials like gold, silver, copper, and platinum, and it depends on resources like steel, stone, and concrete. These discoveries and technologies were made possible only by the application of the scientific method to earth sciences by scientists curious to know how the earth worked.
We are completely and utterly dependent on science and technology for our survival, yet we find that even in the most developed countries of the world, a significant number of people reject some aspect of science because it conflicts with deeply held beliefs. They love what science gives them (such as health, technology, and wealth) but reject science when it tells them something they don’t want to hear. But we don’t get to make that choice. Science is not a restaurant menu that you can pick and choose from. As science educator Bill Nye said, “The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select the facts you like and which you don’t.”1 Or as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “When different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the great thing about science. It’s true, whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.”2
This is particularly true when science finds out something that goes against what we want to believe—what Al Gore aptly called “inconvenient truths.” Scientists don’t get to pick and choose what they want to believe when they are doing research. They are obligated by their training as scientists to report their results, no matter how much it might go against what they wish to be true. Science tells us that we are a product of evolution and that we are closely related to the apes, that humans are insignificant on the scale of the cosmos or in the framework of geologic time, and that humans are destroying the planet through pollution and especially climate change. These things are not comfortable or easy to live with and may be a blow to our notions of cosmic importance—but they are true because that’s what the evidence shows.
Scientists are not spoilsports or killjoys, and we don’t take pleasure in shattering illusions. Despite what some science deniers claim, there’s no incentive for scientists to tell you bad news. We don’t get more grant dollars for telling you the grim truth about climate change or discovering more evidence of your close relationship to the apes. If a scientist tells you an “inconvenient truth,” it is because a scientist must do so as a part of honest, objective reporting of what the data show. An amusing online cartoon shows a variety of scientists speaking inconvenient truths and being punished for it—from Archimedes being killed by the Roman soldier as he did his geometry, to Bruno being burned at the stake for saying the earth is not the center of the universe, to Darwinian evolution, to Einsteinian relativity. The final panel says, “Science: if you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doing it right.”3
What Is Science?
Science is essential to our daily lives now, but very few people actually understand what it is or how it works. The media feed us a diet of stereotypes, especially the classic “mad scientist” trope, complete with the white lab coat, the sparking apparatuses and bubbling beakers, wild hair, and maniacal laugh. But most scientists don’t wear white lab coats. I haven’t worn one since I took chemistry lab in college, and the only scientists who need them are
