ABSTRACT
In his history of earth science, entitled The Dark Side of the Earth, British geophysicist and science writer Robert Muir Wood argues that geology reached its intellectual peak around 1900. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a new earth science developed, replacing anachronistic "geological" concerns and methods with the global view and scientific methodologies of geophysics. Geologists must take a logical stance that amounts to a kind of conversation with the Earth, but a conversation in signs analogous to the conversation in clues so familiar in detective stories. For geologists, mathematics provides a useful tool for explanation, but it does not constitute the language of Earth's text. This earth text cannot be understood fully via a nominalistic language imposed by human convention. The Earth speaks to geologists through its signs. The causal signs—called indices—are objects of interpretation. The earth logic of geology likely will continue to be disparaged by advocates of a disconnecting, overly objective purity in scientific reasoning.
