Wegener heeded Planck’s injunction to think of good theory simply as that mode of treating phenomena that corresponded to the state of empirical research at the moment. Wegener adopted Planck’s phenomenological approach, his indifference to hypothetical causal mechanisms, and his concentration on the bulk properties of matter-temperature, pressure, mass, and volume. He began his graduate career in physics and mathematics and attended Planck’s lectures in thermodynamics and thermochemistry. Wegener was born and raised in Berlin and lived there until the completion of his PhD in 1905. Yet it was precisely this work in atmospheric physics that prepared Wegener to develop a slender intuition concerning the outlines of continents on a map of the Atlantic Ocean into a well-argued geophysical theory of continental displacements.Įarly Training. It is therefore not surprising that the entry by Keith Bullen characterized Wegener as a scientist with a strong interest in geology and geophysics and passed over his considerable career in meteorology and atmospheric physics. 14.Īlfred Wegener was selected for inclusion in the first edition of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography because of the renewed interest in the early 1970s in his theory of continental displacements. For the original article on Wegener see DSB, vol. West Greenland, November 1930), atmospheric physics, geophysics.
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