Sure…an asteroid did it or maybe “volcanoes”…
we all know what or who did it.
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If you read your list, however, you’ll discover that the composer has no more than a tentative grasp of the science, and chooses to focus on the antics of the scientists.
John Harrison, smart fellow that he was, invented a sort of nautical clock that could also determine latitude: the marine chronometer.
Latitude was a solved problem; the real difficulty was in determining longitude.
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With 2 major catastrophes on opposite sides of the earth, it’s possible that the combination had more effect than either catastrophe alone, or both catastrophes in succession with a suitable internal-- let’s say 10 million years-- between.
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You’re right; I just googled “list history science feuds”; I recognized some of the battles (e.g., Darwin vs. Owen, Wegener vs. Everybody, the bone wars), but didn’t read them. My bad, and an ironic one at that!
But I think some of the antics were just as bad as Keller vs. Alvarez. Perhaps Hooke vs. Newton would be a better choice for Isaac.
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Good point!
Something doesn’t sit right with me here. At the very least, the timeline seems really confusing. To be sure the Chicxulub impact has become the most popular hypothesis, ever since the discovery and dating of the crater.
But the Deccan Traps have been known as long and I feel like most detailed works do mention them. And as has been said, combinations are also being considered. I noitce Keller herself now allows the impact might have at least contributed, after previously considering it too early. But even more than this, there’s also been debate about the extent of any catastrophe. The article makes Keller’s model seem gradual, which it certainly is compared to a few years or hours of death, but others have argued it was rather the culmination of millions of years of decline.
An example I’ve read is After the Dinosaurs by Prothero. The author does discuss how sampling problems can make sudden extinctions look gradual, something I personally think seems likely here, especially considering new possibly untrue science news with pterosaurs. But however that turns out in the future, he obviously wasn’t convinced; he goes on to talk about how groups like ammonites may not have even made it to the K-Pg boundary, that by then dinosaurs are only known from a few species in Montana and the Dakotas.
More pertinent here, he also notes a difference in acceptance among different groups. Researchers like geochemists were quick to adopt the impact hypothesis, while vertebrate palaeontologsts have remained more skeptical, with a 2004 survey showing only 20% accepting it as the sole cause of extinction. It doesn’t sound like that was some new doubt.
I don’t doubt that these discussions have often turned extremely acrimonious, especially if they involve egos of different fields and men vs. women, both of which sound like they might have applied to a dispute between Alvarez and Keller. But at what point would it have been a closed debate vs. a lonely contesting voice, as the article makes it out to be? Which makes me wonder how much of this is fitting a narrative.
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Luis Alverez was a physicist of some renown. (he also brought the technique of neutron activation analysis to the table). Here’s the original paper,
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Biologists can be the same way, as discussed here:
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You mean applied chemists? 
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I disagree with nearly everything in that paper. The argument Remco et al made wasn’t that language and morphology are so similar that they can be modeled under the exact same process. It’s that the processes we use to model biological evolution are flexible enough that we can estimate linguistically-relevant parameters under them. Selection also isn’t explicitly modeled in the models used, so that criticism doesn’t make much sense.
Considering that the paper was a collaboration between biologists and linguists (Greenhill), I don’t think this is a fair example of biologists trudging in erasing linguist expertise.
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Really cool article.
But at Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, most of the hydrogen could be flowing as a liquid metal and generating the planet’s powerful magnetic fields.
I’d never really thought about what could be generating Jupiter’s huge magnetic field but that makes a lot of sense. And of course Jupiter rotates really fast (10 hrs?) so that is probably what’s setting up swirls in the hydrogen.
What happened to the diamond core theory though? Could that still be there as well?
Thanks for posting this.
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Each new probe tends to upset the previous generation’s wild theories. Plus-- that may have been Arthur C Clarke’s imagination. It was mentioned in 2063: odyssey 3
http://www.nature.com/news/diamond-drizzle-forecast-for-saturn-and-jupiter-1.13925
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So diamonds in a soup of metallic hydrogen?
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