ABSTRACT
Plate tectonics was clearly defined as a kinematic theory: one that is concerned with geometry. One young faculty member in China knew Dan McKenzie had been one of the people involved in the discovery of plate tectonics. The author arrived as Teddy's graduate student in October 1963, after Fred Vine and Drum Matthews had published their explanation of how the magnetic stripes in the oceans are formed. Between 1963 and 1968 a small group of geophysicists, working at the Universities of Cambridge, Toronto, and Princeton, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and at Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, put together the group of ideas now known as the theory of plate tectonics. In the author's view, plate tectonics was discovered by the group of paleomagnetists working at Madingley in the mid-1950s, in a specially built nonmagnetic hut that still exists, when they showed that the relative motion of continents could be described by continuous rigid rotations.
