air pressure at the time of dinosaurs
By ET
I wrote about innovation and innovative ideas for many times. I’m thinking to create a new category in my blog dedicated to innovations now. It is always so entertaining to read about innovative ideas. Here is one: When we think about dinosaurs, we immediately think about how they got extinct, and there are certainly many explanations out there. I came across this extremely interesting article talking about the air pressure at the time of dinosaurs. In the abstract:
If we visit dinosaurland we will come across some of the most amazing and puzzling phenomena. For example: how can a flying creature as large as a giant quetzalcoatlus (12-15 m wingspan) actually fly when aerodynamic theory and biology both say that it cannot. Also, how can a giant dinosaur such as an apatosaur pump blood up to its brain (more than 13 m above its heart) when animal energetics and physics say that in no way can it do it.
Do we have to change the laws of physics and biology? I don’t think so. Instead we have to accept that ancient Earth’s atmosphereic pressure was very different from what it is today.
The paper concludes: “If you allow yourself to entertain the idea that a higher atmospheric pressure, say between 3 and 5 bar, could have existed in the time of the dinosaurs, it would resolve two of the anomalies that face us today, which are:
* how a dinosaur’s heart could pump blood 7 or more meters upwards, without introducing the ideas of multiple hearts (as many as 8), giant hearts, and hearts located right under their chins, and
* how a giant flying quetzalcoatlus had the energy to stay airborne, something that biology and aerodynamics says is not possible in today’s atmosphere. ”
The author, Octave levenspiel, is not a biologist, nor an archeologist, instead, his specialty is chemical engineering. In academia, there is an old saying:”publish or perish”. Here is the history of submission of this paper:
1. Science , 1992
2. Nature , 1992
3. American Scientist , 1992
4. Science , 1993
5. Nature , 1993
6. Geology , 1993
7. ChemTech , 1993
8. American Scientist , 1994
9. American Scientist , 1996
10. The Sciences , 1996
11. Endeavor , 1996
12. Chemical Engineering Education , 1996
13. Chemical Engineering Science , 1998
14. Science , 1998
15. PUBLISHED in Chemical Innovation , May 2000, Dec 2000
16. Nature , 2004
17. American Scientist , 2004
18. The Lancet , 2004
19. Geology , 2005
Like many great research in history (Wegener’s continental land masses drifting theory and himself were mocked for over 50 years before people suddenly found he had been right), this paper got rejected over and over again. We read so many mediocre papers in all fields, and because they follow a certain way of writing, they get accepted. Innovative ideas helps people to get published, but there seems to be an invisible boundary. I am not an expert in physics or archeology, I hope this paper can get read by more people. Not just about the result of higher air pressure, but about the unique angle of looking at things.
April 20th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Ahh, it is all too easy to invoke Wegener and Continental Crift when considering misunderstood scientist who have been “right all along.” The fact is, Wegener was wrong. Continental Drift doesn’t happen. Plate tectonics does. CD has no driving mechanism, and Wegener thought that the continents were plowing through the oceanic crust like an icebreaker. This would involve unbelievable amounts of force, and appropriatly, Wegener wasn’t believed. It took a lot data, evidence and investigation to find out that Wegener’s essential ideas were right but the process was wrong. Thus, your comparison leaves Dr. Levenspiel to be suspect at best.
April 21st, 2006 at 9:47 am
Thanks for the comment. I’m not an expert on either of them (continental crift or air pressure in ancient times). It strikes me how many times he submitted the paper before it got published.
I liked his article because it jumps out of the common paradigm and studies something unusual.
I disagree with you with the “right” and “wrong” comments, all scientific knowledge is based on certain set of assumptions, it may be “wrong” in the beginning and proved to be “right” afterwards (like Wegener’s essential ideas), or it maybe “right”, then becomes “wrong” (like Newton’s physics). The point is not to argue which one is right or wrong, the real issue is how we can encourage innovative thinkings about what we all believe to be “true”, and push forward our understanding of the world with some simplifying set of assumptions.
I face similar situations in my research, I can replicate other’s methodology and use an already heavily abused dataset to contribute marginally or start to think about some real high-impact issues. The first strategy can almost guaranttee a publication, the second approach has risks of getting rejected by the established community. Where do you think I should invest my efforts?