Hapgood pseudoscience

Andre

I perfectly understand the reason for locking this thread; pseudoscience.

Hapgood proposed a slip of the earth crust to explain assymetric climate zones in the pleistocene, extinctions and an apparant ice free West Antarctica. Such a scenario is extremely odd, but is it really pseudoscience or merely a failed hypothesis?

Hapgood who has a PhD in history btw, made observations and formulated a hypothesis and found more evidence to support it. The hypothesis seemed counter intuitive and was physically difficult to explain but at least he followed kind of a scientific method which ultimately lead to failure. No more than that. Does that make him a quack? Hapgood's only 'failure' to science may have been that he could not face that failure. But that is very human, who is able to give up his pet idea witout a fight? Even Richard Muller still believes in his brown dwarf Nemesis

But with the closing of the thread it became impossible to discus these matters further and show the eager readers what has happened in the past and what kind of lesson can be learned from that. It's also interesting to see if the dialogue between Einstein and Hapgood was faked as has been proposed. I'm convinced that it was real. After all, the book had the foreword of Einstein in it. Hard to fake that.

But with the "earth crust displacement" hypothesis thoroughly falsified (although the debunkers like Mewhinney and Burns made several errors themselfs) , that did not take away the evidence. And the highly contradictory evidence of impossible assymetric climate zones is getting stronger by the day.

Bystander

Amateurs should stay out? Nah, don't like that. Pros (Einstein) can wander so far around the bend it's impossible to believe? Nah, don't like that one, either.

How about, "... physically difficult to explain ...," being the point where amateurs and pros both need to "draw the line," rather than shovelling evidence into great steaming heaps and asking, "What else could it be but UFOs, AGHW, fill in the blank with your favorite 'physically difficult' absurdity?"