# How long did it take scientific theorems/laws to catch on? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 8, 2020, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434 "2020-05-08T21:03:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/21 "2020-05-09T03:44:28Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > As I mentioned, the theory began to become widely accepted by geologists and other professional scientists around 1965. It took maybe 10 years for the message to reach the general public via high school and university courses. So acceptance became more generally from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. I took Earth Science 1965 - 1966 in junior high, and I don’t think it was in our textbook. I did a paper on the accepted cause of mountain building at the time. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/22 "2020-05-09T04:29:52Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > I’m not following this. Darwin did have an explanation for the process: natural selection. As noted, Darwin didn’t have a mechanism for the details of the process. Mendel’s experiments were published in an obscure journal in German in 1866. They didn’t become widely known until they were “re-discovered” in the early 1900s by several geneticists. Darwin had fallen back on [pangenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blending_inheritance) as a mechanism, which was not correct. It was the integration of Mendelian inheritance with natural selection that produced the modern synthesis starting in the early 1900s. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/23 "2020-05-09T04:38:33Z")
Loren Eiseley’s _Darwin’s Century_ is a must-read, detailing the development of evolutionary theory during the 1800’s. Darwin himself began doubting his own theory, equivocating in later editions of _Origin_. (Though his admirer and fellow evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace convinced Darwin to avoid publishing some of the equivocating.) Darwin was beset by mathematicians who pointed out mutations would quickly be diluted by 50:50 mixing. He was also beset by physicists led by (the future) Lord Kelvin who “proved” that the Earth’s age was only tens of millions of years, not giving enough time for advanced mammals to evolve from the simplest organisms. To circumvent these problems, later editions of _Origin_ partially embraced the rival ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck! Both these impediments were solved after Darwin’s death: Gregor Mendel demonstrated that rather than a 50:50 mixture diluting a gene each generation, half the next generation would get the full gene. (Mendel published while Darwin was alive, but Darwin never saw the paper.) And knowledge that the Earth was dozens of times older than Lord Kelvin had computed needed to wait for the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie. ETA: Ninja’ed by **Colibri**. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/24 "2020-05-09T04:42:28Z")
To the OP: If you aren’t already familiar with the concept of a [paradigm shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift) (as discussed by Thomas Kuhn), you may want to look into it. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/25 "2020-05-09T04:45:10Z")
To be clear, Darwin accomplished two things in _Origin of Species_. He amassed all available information from paleontology, anatomy, development, and biogeography that supported the idea that descent with modification, i.e., evolution, had taken place. This in itself was an accomplishment. This summary of the evidence helped many scientists to accept that this had taken place. He also provided a mechanism, natural selection, that was independently proposed by Alfred Russell Wallace. But the details of this mechanism were vague. While this mechanism also caused many scientists to support his ideas, more information was really needed to nail it down. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/26 "2020-05-09T04:56:15Z")
Newton’s theory of gravitation was published in 1687 in _Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica_. > [@](#): > > One of the seminal predictions of Newton’s theory of gravity is that a rotating, self-gravitating mass such as the earth will be an oblate spheroid - i.e., it will be flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator… This became the touchstone of the Newton/Descartes debate - if the earth is in fact an oblate spheroid then Newtonian physics is probably right; if it is a prolate spheroid (contracted at the equator) then Newtonian physics is definitely wrong… Bernoulli made some calculations in the spirit of DesCartes’ vortex model and came up with a prolate spheroid… > > If the earth is oblate, then a degree of latitude near the arctic circle will be longer than a degree near the equator. The scientific debate over Newton’s physics, combined with the cartographic significance of the question, led France to mount two expeditions to measure a degree of latitude at widely separated locations on earth. The Academie Royale des Sciences sent expeditions to Lapland and to Peru to make the measurements. These were extraordinarily ambitious and difficult undertakings that lasted years, exposed the scientists to extremes of climate and physical risk, and required making precise, painstaking geodetic measurements over hundreds of miles of rugged terrain. Maupertuis published the results of these expeditions in 1738, 51 years after Newton published on Gravitation. Spoiler alert: Newton’s prediction was spot-on. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/27 "2020-05-09T07:35:46Z")
The 1919 astronomical observations proving Einstein’s General Theory remain controversial — some think Eddington fudged ambiguous data — but Einstein himself had noticed experimental evidence supporting his theory by 1916 — the precession of Mercury’s orbit. The atomic theory of matter had a very long history before its final acceptance. It was proposed in ancient Greece by Leucippus and Democritus, defended by Isaac Newton, and seemingly implied by Dalton’s Law of Multiple Proportions published in 1804. However, many scientists accepted Dalton’s Law but didn’t agree it implied an atomic theory. The final proof of the atomic theory was established by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper on Brownian motion. Another controversy of physics where Einstein played a role was the question of whether light was wave or particle. This controversy raged for centuries, but during the 19th century physicists abandoned Newton’s particle theory to embrace a wave theory. This conclusion was overturned, again in 1905, by Einstein’s discovery of the photon. Light was _both_ wave _and_ particle. But the idea that electro-magnetic waves could also be particles remained controversial until Arthur Holly Compton’s discovery of the “Compton shift” of X-rays in 1923. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/28 "2020-05-09T07:39:31Z")
Modern ideas about medieval history have still not penetrated through to the general public, more than 25 years after Susan Reynolds published _Fiefs and Vassals_, and nearly 50 years after Peter Brown published _The World of Late Antiquity_. 99% of the general public today still hold outdated ideas about ‘the fall of the Roman empire’, the ‘dark ages’, the ‘feudal system’, etc. - wrong ideas dating back to the 18th and 19th century, now superceded and universally dismissed by professional historians. The old concepts have been shown to be wrong by modern systematic analysis of large quantities of medieval documents, and by modern archeology. But the old ideas are still fed to the public by existing school textbooks, and by innumerable books and movies, so it may be generations before the new understandings become general. “The medieval period could thus be seen as a random invention, a confidence trick perpetrated on the future by a few scholars. But it has become a powerful image, as more and more layers of ‘modernity’ have built up.”   — Prof. Christopher Wickham, emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, _Medieval Europe_ (2016) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/29 "2020-05-09T13:44:32Z")
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was an idea whose time had come. It was surprising, but there was lots of groundwork there, in the works of Lorentz, Maxwell, Michelson, and many others (maybe also Minkowski; I’m not sure if any of his work was before Einstein’s). But while General Relativity followed on from Special (and also from the work of Riemann), it was a much bigger leap. The eclipse of 1919 is often cited as the proof of the theory, but in fact, the error bars in the data were large enough to encompass both Newton and Einstein. I think that it was the fact that it explained the perihelion precession of Mercury that really nailed it down for most physicists, though that wasn’t exactly a “prediction” of the theory: It was already known, and one of the puzzles of science, at the time that Einstein published (there’s a tale, possibly apocryphal, that one of the great scientists of the turn of that century stated that the perihelion advance of Mercury and the blackbody spectrum were the only two puzzles remaining to physics, and that once we explained those, physics was a completed discipline). And Kelvin’s calculation of the age of the Sun was in conflict with Darwin’s theory of evolution, but it was also inconsistent with what geologists of the time were starting to conclude about the age of the Earth. So it wasn’t quite the slam-dunk refutation of evolution that it might appear to be. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/30 "2020-05-09T13:52:07Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > Modern ideas about medieval history have still not penetrated through to the general public, more than 25 years after Susan Reynolds published _Fiefs and Vassals_, and nearly 50 years after Peter Brown published _The World of Late Antiquity_. > > 99% of the general public today still hold outdated ideas … Explain, please. What are some of the wrong ideas people have, and what is the real history? That may be a big question, but can you cite just a few examples, briefly? ---
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/31 "2020-05-09T14:43:01Z")
There is no general answer, but when experimental or observed evidence repeatedly confirms the predicted values. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/32 "2020-05-09T15:04:53Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > Explain, please. What are some of the wrong ideas people have, and what is the real history? > > That may be a big question, but can you cite just a few examples, briefly? It is a long story, and that’s a large part of the problem. There’s no simple, quick, glib explanation. Let’s take one example: “Why did the Roman empire fall? The short answer is that it didn’t.”   — Prof. Christopher Wickham, _Medieval Europe_ (2016) Okay, so then what did happen to the Roman empire? It’s too long a story to go into the details - but the idea that ‘barbarians’ conquered Rome at some specific point in time, and that there was then a ‘dark age’ is simply wrong. Some points to go on with: The Goths, Vandals, Franks, etc. who took over most of the Western part of the Roman Empire were Christians, before they invaded. They mostly left the framework of the Christian Church, the Pope, the bishops, etc. intact. (Except the Vandals in North Africa who were fanatical Arian Christians and tried to suppress Nicene Christians.) Many of their leaders were literate, spoke Latin, and some had indeed served as officers in the Roman army. They mostly kept the Roman tax systems, administration, and commercial systems as intact as they could, even keeping Roman officials in place. There was no huge discontinuity, but rather a gradual breakdown of central control, and fragmentation into separate kingdoms over a period of time, under peoples who didn’t consider themselves to be Roman, but in general didn’t destroy what previously existed either. The fact of fragmentation meant that the new kingdoms were poorer and trade was reduced. From the wiki article on the [Vandal Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandal_Kingdom): > [@](#): > > Although primarily remembered for the sack of Rome in 455 and their persecution of Nicene Christians in favor of Arian Christianity, the Vandals were also patrons of learning. Grand building projects continued, schools flourished and North Africa fostered many of the most innovative writers and natural scientists of the late Latin Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire remained intact, and anyway had been administratively separate from the Western half since the 4th century. We call them Byzantines, but they considered themselves Romans, and continued to call themselves Romans, right up to the end. There was no break with the Roman past. The Emperor Justinian reconquered Italy and some southern parts of what is today France and Spain in the 5th century (later lost). The Eastern Roman Empire remained wealthy and influential, despite Muslim conquests, through most of the medieval period. These are only the briefest few isolated comments about a long, complex unfolding story of what happened to Rome. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/33 "2020-05-09T15:37:41Z")
On the new understanding of feudalism, see this excellent article: [The Problem With Feudalism](https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836) ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/34 "2020-05-09T16:06:17Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > On the new understanding of feudalism, see this excellent article: > > [The Problem With Feudalism](https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836) From the article: > [@](#): > > Perhaps most significantly, no one had presented a reasonable model or explanation to use in place of feudalism. Some historians and authors felt they had to provide their readers with a handle by which to grasp the general ideas of medieval government and society. \*\*If not feudalism, then what? > \*\* > Yes, the emperor had no clothes, but for now, he would just have to run around naked. [my bold] Interesting article, but unfortunately, this important question remains unanswered, the quote is the last paragraph. So what was the predominant societal system in the middle ages? ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/35 "2020-05-09T16:16:07Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > On the new understanding of feudalism, see this excellent article: > > [The Problem With Feudalism](https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836) I clicked to read this article with great interest. And was greatly disappointed. It repeats the same message over and over: > [@](#): > > Scholars viewed land agreements and social relationships through the warped lens of the feudalism construct and either disregarded or dismissed anything that didn’t fit into their version of the model. OK. The feudalism construct is wrong. But what model _does_ fit the _real_ land agreements and social relationships? The feudalism construct has very specific ideas. _Which_ of them are wrong, and _Why?_ Did the article link to a Part-Two follow-on I neglected to click? ETA: Ninja’ed by **EinsteinsHund**. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/36 "2020-05-09T16:54:40Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Another good example of delayed acceptance. Like Darwin, who didn’t know about genes or Mendelian genetics, Wegener had a theory but no good mechanism. Similarly, [Ignaz Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis), a Hungarian doctor practising in Vienna, proposal that doctors should wash their hands with a disinfectant, each time they were about to examine a woman who had just given birth. He was able to show that doing so greatly reduced the spread of puerperal fever, which was a killer disease in hospital maternity wards, but he couldn’t advance any reason for it. He was widely mocked and professionally ridiculed by other physicians who refused to accept that there could be transmission of disease in this way. It wasn’t until Pasteur published about germ theory that it was confirmed that hands could appear completely clean, and yet contain microscopic particles that could cause disease. Pasteur’s discovery came too late for Semmelwis: he’d been committed to an insane asylum, and died a couple of weeks later, from a gangrenous infection that was likely caused by a beating from the guards. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/37 "2020-05-09T18:09:56Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Similarly, [Ignaz Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis), a Hungarian doctor practising in Vienna, proposal that doctors should wash their hands with a disinfectant, each time they were about to examine a woman who had just given birth. > > He was able to show that doing so greatly reduced the spread of puerperal fever, which was a killer disease in hospital maternity wards, but he couldn’t advance any reason for it. He was widely mocked and professionally ridiculed by other physicians who refused to accept that there could be transmission of disease in this way. > > It wasn’t until Pasteur published about germ theory that it was confirmed that hands could appear completely clean, and yet contain microscopic particles that could cause disease. > > Pasteur’s discovery came too late for Semmelwis: he’d been committed to an insane asylum, and died a couple of weeks later, from a gangrenous infection that was likely caused by a beating from the guards. Semelweis’ opposition came from self-important doctors of the time. They did not deride the theory so much as take offense at the idea that they, highly educated upper class members of Viennese society, could have hands as filthy as a common ditch-digger. The implication was the insult. the facts were worse. Doctors were looking for the cause of puerperal fever, and would go from autopsies of dead mothers to deliveries while merely wiping their hands, deliberately spreading the fever. the ward run by nurses and midwives, which did not do autopsies, apparently had a significantly lower rate of fever. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/38 "2020-05-09T18:29:49Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > So what was the predominant societal system in the middle ages? > [@septimus](#): > > OK. The feudalism construct is wrong. But what model _does_ fit the _real_ land agreements and social relationships? > The feudalism construct has very specific ideas. _Which_ of them are wrong, and _Why?_ To answer **EinsteinsHund** and **Septimus** : The medieval period was incredibly diverse and often rapidly changing. You simply can’t make any generalizations. From one end of Europe to the other, there were different political and social systems, different types of taxation and land use, different power structures, different legal systems, different religious views and different relationships between religious and secular powers - and these were not fixed. Even in the same area or ‘country’, all these things changed over time. I’ve just been re-reading Wickham’s book (hence my quotes from it), and when you look at the big picture - and even the brief overview he gives takes nearly 500 densely written pages - the overall impression is that there is no one pattern of medieval history, or even 20 patterns. Every locality did things differently, and things didn’t stay the same over time. To say that “medieval people thought in this way” or “medieval society was structured like this” becomes laughable. All you can say is, This is how it was in 12th century Denmark, this is how it was in 9th century Aragon, this is how it was in 11th century Flanders, this is how it was in 13th century northern Italy, this how it was in 10th century Byzantium… This how it was in 12th century ‘France’ (a vague term), and in the 13th century it changed to this, and in the 14th century it changed to this, and in the 15th century it changed to this… This is how trade and industry were in southern Europe in the 11th century, and it was like this in eastern Europe at the same time, and like this in Scandinavia, with this and this exception… The general tendency in this area changed in this direction during this period… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/39 "2020-05-09T18:36:44Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > As I mentioned, the theory [continental drift] began to become widely accepted by geologists and other professional scientists around 1965. It took maybe 10 years for the message to reach the general public via high school and university courses. So acceptance became more generally from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. Just for kicks, and because I have a 1953 Compton’s Encyclopedia, I looked up “continental drift.” There was just one reference, tucked in the article titled “Earth,” to wit: > [@](#): > > An American and an Austrian geologist suggested that the continents had drifted to their present positions. The Austrian, Alfred Wegener, pictured one huge early continent that began to break up about 230 million years ago. Its sections then moved over a fluid layer which might have been melted by radioactive heat. North and South America drifted westward; Africa pulled away from Europe; Antarctica went to the South Pole. Asia swung northward, while Australia drifted far to the east. > > Each of these theories explains some facts, but fails to explain others; and objections can be found to all of them. The continental drift theory meets this objection, for example, that centrifugal force ought to have sent drifting masses toward the equator. The other theories include a proposal that when the Earth was molten, heavier regions sank to become ocean bottom and lighter ones were pushed upward, forming continents. I guess that’s not wrong, but not sufficient. There is no entry in this edition under _Sea Floor Spreading, Seafloor Spreading,_ or even _Spreading_ which lends credence to **Colibri’s** timeline of acceptance ca. 1965. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434/40 "2020-05-09T19:33:40Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > All you can say is, > > This is how it was in 12th century Denmark, this is how it was in 9th century Aragon, this is how it was in 11th century Flanders, this is how it was in 13th century northern Italy, this how it was in 10th century Byzantium… > This how it was in 12th century ‘France’ (a vague term), and in the 13th century it changed to this, and in the 14th century it changed to this, and in the 15th century it changed to this… > This is how trade and industry were in southern Europe in the 11th century, and it was like this in eastern Europe at the same time, and like this in Scandinavia, with this and this exception… > The general tendency in this area changed in this direction during this period… > > 😃 That’s nothing new. That was the basic approach my prof in medieval Europe history took, all those [mumblety-mumble] years ago. He was particularly interested in the differences between feudalism in “France”, compared to feudalism in England, and the fact that the great lords of “France” were generally more powerful than their nominal feudal overlord, the King of France, compared to the much different power structure in England under the Conqueror. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-did-it-take-scientific-theorems-laws-to-catch-on/853434.md?page=3)