'No one will take me seriously,' complains the scientific pioneer, exploring far ahead of the pack. We fully sympathise: but it is not easy to 'take seriously' a surmise that seems wildly at variance with our comfortable notions of reality. 'The Earth going round the sun? Fiddlesticks.' 'Men descended from Apes? Pshaw!' 'Drifting continents? Whatever next?' How deplorable to scoff, and yet how difficult to pick out the one such idea in a thousand that is not, after all, as wrongheaded as it first seems.

LRB 18 March 1982 | PDF Download