Each year the Meteoritical Society awards the Barringer Medal to a scientist recognized for his or her outstanding work in the field of impact cratering. At the 63rd meeting of the Society this year, the medal was presented to Dr. Ralph Baldwin, a towering figure in the history of lunar geology. What follows are excerpts from the award citation by Bevan M. French, along with some of Dr. Baldwin's own thoughts about "preaching scientific heresy." Both articles appeared in the September issue of Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
[Ralph Baldwin] is special because he is one of the founders of two active fields of scientific discovery: lunar geology and terrestrial meteorite impact structures. His attempts to establish these fields half a century ago were greeted with disagreement - and much worse, with apathy and disinterest. He is especially fortunate as well, because he has lived to see his life's work justified, expanded, and carried on by several generations of new scientists.
... [H]is introduction to the Moon came from huge lunar photographs that lined the hall of the Adler Planetarium, where he supplemented an instructor's income by giving lectures at five dollars apiece. By examining the pictures, he gradually formulated the principles of current lunar geology: that lunar craters (especially the large ones) are the results of large impact events, not volcanism; that the lack of active lunar erosion means that the craters are very old; that the Earth, with the same history, should have been bombarded in the same way; and that there should be impact structures, large and small, still preserved on the Earth.
The initial response of the scientific community to Ralph's ideas was underwhelming. His first article on the subject, after being widely rejected, finally appeared in Popular Astronomy in 1942. His first lecture, at Yerkes Observatory in 1941, produced a mixture of apathy and disinterest, with no conversions and no encouragement. A normal astronomy instructor, perhaps worried about tenure, would probably have gone back to stellar spectra, but Ralph's reaction to what he called the "Yerkes fiasco" was typical of him. As he wrote later, "I had become convinced by the negative responses... that a book-length study was going to be necessary. I collected a very large amount of data."
...The Face of the Moon [was published in] 1949. This book is one of the great benchmark books of twentieth-century science; it, and its expanded sequel, The Measure of the Moon (1963), contain virtually the entire scientific structure for the subsequent decades of research on lunar geology and terrestrial impact structures.
It's all in there: the "Baldwin Curve" showing the correlated depth-diameter values for impact and explosion craters; the concept of impact cratering as a general planetary process; the importance of impacts on the Earth as well as on the Moon; a list of ~ 50 terrestrial structures, nearly all subsequently proven to be the results of impact; the possible role of terrestrial impacts in past biological extinctions; and finally ( 30 years before the Alvarezes, the Cretaceous-Tertiary, and Killer Asteroids), the possibility of future catastrophic impacts on the Earth. Even now, one rereads these books with awe, wondering, as Don Wilhelms put it, "How one guy could get so much so right so early?"
In his Barringer Medal Address, Dr. Baldwin speculated on the reasons for the scientific community's initial lack of interest in his work. He drew his insights from conversations with a former employee whom he identified only as "Elmer."
The Face of the Moon appeared in January, 1949. With nine prominent and prompt exceptions, the book was largely ignored for a few years... I could not understand this. The observations were clear and definitive. The Moon's craters, and, of course, many terrestrial examples had to be of impact origin. Yet many otherwise excellent scientists read or listened to the evidence and remained of the same opinion, that the Moon's craters were some form of volcanism. It didn't make sense.
Elmer had the same type of mentality. He "knew" that his religious ideas were correct. He listened to scientific arguments to the contrary, but his brain refused to analyze the presented data. Anything contrary to his beliefs could not be true and therefore there was no point in his trying to interpret them.... What Elmer had done was to show me that many people were not sufficiently flexible mentally to allow them to change their minds when new evidence was presented.
When a human brain is taught an idea, particularly if the person is very young, he will often adopt this idea fully. His brain may, in effect, click off after the idea has been emplaced. When different ideas are later suggested, he will find that they are in conflict with the original idea and therefore they are erroneous and there is no interest in reanalyzing the subject and the new ideas will be discarded without further thought.
...Unless the brain has been so trained that it can analyze new observations and then modify earlier conclusions as part of a continuing process, then human beings will continue to believe what they learned previously. It is my opinion that scientists, in particular, have made significant strides away from this direction; they are more flexible now than they were when I was young, and more nearly ready to accept and work with new ideas. But my own experience in trying to teach them to look at the solar system in a different fashion in the pre-Apollo period showed that even as recently as the 1960's, many of them had clicked off their brains and could not adopt the new ideas that are now considered to be correct.
Hand Built for maximum Impact by The Cyrus Company. 1998.