Nothing in science is written in stone.

Whenever new discoveries force scientists to reconsider their hypotheses, theories and data, they do just that. This is why people think of science as a collection of concepts that are always being revised.

This holds true for the basic building block concepts within science as well. The cell is a perfect example of this: in the mid-1600s, Robert Hooke used one of the very first microscopes to examine thin slices of cork. When he saw that the cork plant was made up of tiny box-shaped pieces, he gave science the concept of the cell. For 100 years, people thought of the cell as the smallest thing inside all living creatures. But then, in 1781, Felice Fontana spotted something even smaller inside the cells from an eel: the nucleolus. This discovery made people rethink the idea that cells were the tiniest things inside living creatures. Clearly, there were even smaller things inside cells.

Since Fontana’s time, scientists have refined, revised, and rewritten their view of the cell thousands of times in order to match up with every piece of new data. This same process has happened with the scientific view of geological processes including plate tectonics and earthquakes.

Review attachment 17.2  on “Science in the Making, Reactions to Plate Tectonics.” and answer questions below also

Learn more about Alfred Wegener here:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/wegener.html  

http://scign.jpl.nasa.gov/learn/plate2.htm