'I enjoy, and always have enjoyed, disturbing scientists.'

     By ROBERT DEAN CLARK

     Any of the thousands of daily visitors to the intellectual Disneyland known as the Ontario Science Centre has a good chance of going elbow to elbow with J. Tuzo Wilson (whom the co-jostler might easily mistake for Ray Milland, or a resurrected, sans tufted eyebrows, Henry Luce) at the keyboard of one of its many video games.
     "Yes," confirms Mattie Howitt, Wilson's dervish of an administrative assistant from her command post adjacent to the director general's office, "I have to go get him off the floor all the time so he can sign the things he has to sign."
     The center's ingenious video games are an evolutionary advance over their cousins Pac-Man et al, but despite that qualification the vision of Wilson at a console is jolting. It is comparable to one of Isaac Newton frolicking in a Restoration sandbox. The linkage of those names does not strain credibility because the 73-year-old Wilson is quite possibly the world's most honored living geophysicist. He is a major contributor to the recently developed dynamic view of the earth, a revolution in scientific thinking that ranks in importance with those which followed Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

     Wilson revels in the knowledge that the image of himself at play with hoi polloi (there being considerable difficulty in establishing who is having the better time) upsets the stuffier of his academic peers. "I enjoy, and always have enjoyed, disturbing scientists," he says.
     That began almost six decades ago in the id-1920s when, following his freshman year at the University of Toronto, he shocked his teachers by suggesting a switch in majors. The move he wanted to make, from physics to geology, was viewed at that time as intellectual abdication. Physics was then in its Golden Age, staggering the world with relativity and insights into atomic structure and prior to the public disillusionment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ruled unchallenged as supreme monarch of science. Geology was considered infantile, a field for scholastic hacks and hardly worthy of its own Nobel Prize. The great physicist Ernest Rutherford called geology as intellectually respectable as collecting postage stamps.
     (Lord Rutherford may have said that but he apparently wasn't so narrow-minded. Wilson says Rutherford advised Edward Bullard, later famous as head of the department of geodesy and geophysics at Cambridge, to become a geophysicist.)

     Despite warnings that he was headed for the wrong side of the scientific tracks, Wilson remained determined to change majors. "Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory." But it still took some luck to rescue him from a lab-coated fate because "at that time students were pretty much told what they could bloody well do."
     It was Wilson's good fortune that Prof. Lachlin Gilchrist, a classical physicist, had recognized the potential of geophysics as a prospecting tool and was looking for a student who could be trained in both physics and geology. "I became his guinea pig," Wilson says.
     He claims that by taking a double major in geology/physics ("geophysics hadn't even been heard of at that time") he achieved a unique perspective, broader than that of either geologists who had no sense of physics or of classical physicists who had no idea of the earth's complexity. As a result, he was present virtually at the moment of creation of geophysics as a science unto itself, a discipline for which he was ideally suited.

     He inherited his geophysical genes from both parents. They met while attending the first camp of the Alpine Club of Canada. His mother, while still Miss Henrietta Tuzo, was the first person to climb one of the mountains that frames the Valley of the Ten Peaks in British Columbia. The peak was then unnamed, known only as No. 7. Years later it officially became Mt. Tuzo and is part of the scenery decorating the back of Canada's $20 bill. Wilson has emulated his mother both as mountain climber (in 1935 he made the first solo ascent of Mt. Hague in Montana) and as the source of a name for elevated grandeur (an Antarctic range is now called the Wilson Mountains.)
     His professional affiliation with the earth began in 1924 at age 15 when his father got him a job, at $1 a day, in a forestry camp. Two years later he became a field assistant to Noel Odell, a famous mountaineer, who "showed me the wonders of field geology and inspired me to pursue it in my higher education, despite the low estate in which it was then held."
     That was so far from the academic mainstream that Gilchrist could arrange only two very incomplete lecture courses in geophysics for Wilson to take and he was the only student in one. "Nevertheless," Wilson says, "when I graduated in 1930 I could claim I had become, more by accident than design, the first Canadian graduate in a course designed to train geophysicists."

     That was the emptiest of honors. There were a mere dozen people in Canada then doing some kind of paying geophysical work and prospects that the job market would expand were zero.
     However, Wilson's academic performance had been of such quality (he deprecates this, saying "Nobody quite knew what geophysics was and it was then quite easy to get good marks in geology") that he won a scholarship to Cambridge, ostensibly to study under the eminent Sir Harold Jeffreys. Wilson soon discovered that nobody really studied under Jeffreys. Sir Harold, although rated one of the geniuses of earth science, had no talent as a teacher. "I could neither hear nor understand his lectures," Wilson says, "but he was accustomed to this and didn't hold it against me."
     Wilson describes his stay at Cambridge as "two years of traveling, rowing, flying and drinking." The learning, although he added another degree, was minimal due to Jeffrey's eccentricities and because the department of geodesy and geophysics was only then being formed.

     Wilson returned to Canada at the depth of the depression, and not surprisingly again could find no work as a geophysicist. The director of the Geological Survey of Canada advised him to earn a doctorate in geology, indicating that might be the key to future employment there. Wilson dutifully headed for Princeton, choosing it over Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for three reasons: it offered some money, it was the only one with plans to teach any geophysics, and it was the only one "where I knew anybody."
     Wilson had but two fellow geology/geophysics graduate students at Princeton in 1933 - George Woollard and D. C. Skeels, but collectively the trio possessed an astonishing amount of brain power. Wilson and Woollard both have entries in the current Encyclopedia Britannica for theoretical work. Skeels, a Rhodes scholar, became an explorationist with Carter Oil and other Standard of New Jersey companies.

     While at Princeton, Wilson met two others, Maurice Ewing and Harry Hess, destined to become seminal figures in geophysics. Ewing, then teaching at Lehigh about 60 miles from Princeton, was just starting the seismic research which would provide much of the data base for the geophysical revolution of the last 20 years. Hess had just joined the Princeton faculty, not in geophysics which he had yet to discover, but as a teacher of mineralogy.
     "At that time Ewing was a happy young man," Wilson says, "newly married, very hard working of course, but still willing to take us to his home for supper and a jolly evening chatting. Later he became a compulsive worker and a recluse. Hess, on the other hand, had geological insights and an understanding of the earth that Ewing, who remained a physicist, never achieved although he devised new instruments and sent out more and more expeditions."

     In 1936 Wilson got his doctorate from Princeton and joined the Geological Survey of Canada where he would remain until the start of World War II. He spent most of those three years in the field and he has one mesmerizing relic from the period which hangs in an honored place on an office wall far too small to accommodate some of the most coveted awards in science. It is a note straight out of Robert Service:

     Ben Germain Aug 7 1938
     pardner drounded
     in the rapes
     Im out on Illent
     Im guing to try to make thet
     Illent with sand on it
     tell the plan com ...
     

     The note breaks off there, giving a grim glimpse of the terrors of the far north and the courage of those who dared them. The contrast with modern, "civilized" man, who considers a day without proper heat a hardship, could hardly be sharper. A happy postscript: The geophysicist rescued the luckless, semi-literate prospector.
     Wilson spent seven years in the Canadian army, much of that time writing technical reports at a frenzied pace. The experience gave him a graceful prose style and an enthusiasm for writing. "I wrote 500 reports during the war," he says. "It taught me to write accurately and fast. Before that there was a lot of pencil sucking."

     Immediately after the war he led Exercise Musk-Ox, the only long (3,400 miles) automotive expedition ever made through the Canadian Arctic.
     "Most people don't know it, but there was Arctic warfare, quite a number of small operations, and Canada quite logically had been put in charge of it. We had developed and adapted a lot of equipment and at the end of the war we had a small number of over-snow vehicles. It seemed a pity not to try them out, so we organized the operation.
     "We started at Churchill, Manitoba, which was the most northern railhead in Canada and went straight north to the Arctic islands (where party member Morris Innes relocated the north magnetic pole), then west along the coast and sea ice to Coppermine, then south to the railhead in Alberta.
     "I don't think it will ever be done again. Nobody will be crazy enough. We did it then because we had the chance. We wanted to demonstrate that it was our country, that you could go up there and travel and live and investigate it."

     Wilson's major career decision came in 1946. He could remain in the army where he had risen to the rank of colonel; he could take his geophysical expertise into industry; or he could go back to the geological survey. He chose none of them.
     "To my surprise, I was offered the job of succeeding my old professor Gilchrist at the University of Toronto." He took it.
     Two decades earlier, when Wilson had decided to pursue earth sciences in academic work, his timing had been poor. Now it was ideal. The 1947 discovery of Alberta's Leduc field set off an oil boom in Canada, generating a great demand for geophysicists. Meanwhile, the instruments and techniques of geophysical exploration were starting to provide earth scientists with infinitely better data quantitatively and qualitatively.
     Over the next decade Wilson achieved an international reputation. This arose from his work on mapping Canada's glaciers, his studies of mountain building and continental structure, and his knowledge of the occurrence of basic minerals. A three-year term, 1957-60, as president of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, which overlapped the International Geophysical Year, seemed the climax of his career.
     It wasn't. All had been only prelude to Wilson's coming work - various theories and an equally vital evangelism in support of radical, wildly unpopular ideas - which would elevate him to historic stature.

     This involved the research and political infighting which changed the accepted view of the earth from essentially static to mobile - in the vernacular, continental drift. The theory is now secure earth science dogma but less than 20 years ago it was anathema. Wilson himself was booed the first time he spoke publicly in support of it. In the late 1950s the number of scientific drifters was only slightly larger than the membership of the Flat Earth Society.

     Wilson himself was notably and solidly in the anti-drift ranks until quite late, an embarrassment he openly discusses. "Other sciences gloried in accurate theories from which one could make reliable predictions, but no theories about the earth seemed to make any sense. This difference between geology and physics had become apparent to me as an undergraduate, but like most others I was too stupid to see the answer to the puzzle."
     Continental drift had been formally theorized by German Alfred Wegener in 1912 but virtually abandoned in the next 20 years. "It was scarcely mentioned at any of the three universities I attended," Wilson says. "The whole establishment of geological surveys, university departments, mining companies, and petroleum organizations opposed any idea of continental drift."

     From 1930 to 1960 a scientist who supported it knowingly committed academic hara-kiri. S. W. Carey of Tasmania, a major figure in igniting the revolution, could not get his papers published in reputable scientific journals in the 1950s. "He had to run them off on a mimeograph machine and distribute them himself," Wilson says. In 1963 a paper by Canadian L. W. Morley, which contained ideas confirmed less than a year later, was rejected by journals in both England and the United States.
     Wilson himself considered continental drift as being "without cause or physical theory" as late as 1959. But when sophisticated paleomagnetic research supported Hess' 1960 theory of sea-floor spreading, he converted. And when he did, he became almost instantly a central figure in the battle.

     He was an unlikely candidate for such a role. He was already past 50, well beyond the normal scientific prime. An astonishing number of the most profound scientific concepts have been developed by men under 40. Ironically, these same men are, at more advanced ages, often unable to accept new ideas no matter how widely or well they are supported. Even Einstein was no exception. He was unable to accept the principle of uncertainty. Thus, he spent the last 30 years of his career, in the telling words of Isaac Asimov, as nothing more than a living monument while physics went on without him.
     But Wilson was an exception - even though it caused him to disown some of his previous and most highly regarded work. The war over continental drift lasted another eight years. Wilson contributed several important ideas, including permanent hot spots in the earth's mantle (1963); transform faults, one of the key concepts leading to the theory of plate tectonics (1965); and an elaborate cycle of mountain building which includes such trivial matters as the opening and closing of oceans (1966).
     In addition, he did a prodigious amount of fifth column work in support of the revolution. He has often been called the leading spokesman for continental drift, a view that has considerable statistical support. During the 60s he published more than 60 articles in formally scientific and popular journals and was the spokesman for drift in the famous debate with Soviet scientist V. V. Beloussov, the leading academic holdout.

     The climactic battles in the revolution roughly coincided with Wilson's 60th birthday. A graceful slide into retirement, punctuated by visits to pick up the major awards he had unquestionably earned, was in order. Wilson did leave his professorship at Toronto but only to take another demanding job as principal of its new Erindale College. Still another career, as director of the world's largest science center, would follow in the 1970s.
     The expected honors have arrived on schedule, including Fellowship in the Royal Society (1968), the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America (1968), the Walter H. Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union (1968), Honorary Membership in the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (1973), the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1975), the Vetlesen Prize of Columbia University (1978), the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London (1978), the Huntsman Award of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (1981), and SEG's Maurice Ewing Medal (1981).

     Academic practice forced Wilson to leave Erindale in 1974 at age 65, a campus he had built from scratch. But again, there was no thought of retirement. At the request of Ontario's premier, he immediately became director general of the five-year-old Ontario Science Centre.
     "The Premier asked me to come here because everybody had told him how much fun the Centre was," Wilson says. "That worried him because he thought that anything that was so much fun couldn't be very serious or scientific."
     But Wilson declined the mandate, if indeed one was intended, to make the Centre a somber scientific Parthenon. He found its hands-on approach to science "perfectly splendid" and made only minimal changes in its direction. His major impact was to put his own immense scientific prestige squarely behind the Centre and help it become the world's largest via his amazing energy and considerable public relations skills.
     Wilson's vigor is indescribable. Administrative assistant Mattie Howitt says the septuagenarian hasn't missed a day of work because of illness in more than six years and neither, therefore, has she - for fear of getting inescapably in arrears in her work. He often takes the subway to the Centre and is behind his desk before 7 a.m. He has to be there early to get through his paperwork. Normal working hours overflow with meetings, scheduled and impromptu, regarding the Centre or the many advisory boards of which he is a member.

     He maintains a very extensive traveling and speaking schedule. He has made nine trips around the world and estimates averaging 1,000 miles a week of travel since 1950. This summer he made a quick overnight jaunt to the North Pole (36 years after his first visit as a guest of the US Army Air Force) and was back at work the next day.
     It is obvious that Wilson thoroughly enjoys this job which on the surface would appear less than challenging to someone who has been on the frontiers of an intellectual upheaval. But he's intimately familiar with all aspects of the Centre and can call all 200 of its permanent staff by first name. "I took this job when I retired," Wilson often tells visitors. But it's apparent that it is hardly a retirement job - he was scheduled to vacation the entire month of August but didn't escape until Aug. 12th and then only after spending a couple of hours in the office - and it is improbable that Wilson soon, if ever, will retire.

     The reason? Most likely the importance of the Science Centre concept, in keeping the general public informed about science, a matter of ever mounting concern. The future of science is now in the hands of the public. Basic research has gotten so expensive that only governments can afford to finance much of it. Also, because of the fantastic changes already wrought in human existence and others still to come, science has evolved into the central moral issue of the age. Thus science will need both public money and public approval in the foreseeable future.
     The corollary - obvious to Wilson but not to many other museum curators "who don't care anything about the public who pays the bills, they just want to impress other curators" - is that the public must be taught science so that it will not play its vital role in the darkness of ignorance.
     Wilson thinks science centers, with their hands-on and fun approach, are far and away the best method. "You can't do it through books because the public, because of television, isn't very good at reading books these days," he says. "Besides, experiments are the best way of teaching science. Nobody would dream of teaching science without a lab and that's what a science center is, a science lab for the public where everybody can learn at his own pace."

     The Ontario Science Centre has over 1,000 exhibits, 400 of which can be handled - indeed are designed to be handled - by its visitors. The exhibits range from primitive to complex video games that teach first aid (and bluntly inform the operator if the patient died from improper treatment) to a $60,000 electron microscope which the public can use and a $50,000 industrial robot, now in the final stages of development, which the public will be able to operate.
     This battle for public support resulted from "science being remiss in not keeping the public informed. Most scientific journals are incomprehensible to the layman." But Wilson is optimistic that the battle can be won. "The idea that people dislike or are afraid of science is misleading. They say people don't appreciate science. I don't believe it," he says.

     However, he also thinks science must make an intelligent effort to meet the public on the latter's own ground, something science has not had to do in the past. "Artists have known for centuries that they must advertise or perish. Scientists, until recently, could remain content with the appreciation of the narrow circle of their peers. They didn't have to shout for support. Artists have always had to shout. Scientists are used to sitting in the lab thinking the public should support them."
     There is evidence that Wilson's trust in the public and the Centre is well founded. The Ontario Science Centre is now averaging 1.5 million visitors annually and another 500,000 see its traveling science circus (its actual name). The combined figure approaches 10% of Canada's population, the kind of number that quickly gets the attention of the industry. On one typical August day Wilson had visitors from museums and centers in Singapore, Denmark, and Washington, DC, whose institutions wanted to add exhibits along similar lines.

     Wilson himself takes every opportunity to expand the campaign beyond the Centre's walls by accepting dozens of speaking invitations from all kinds of civic groups. These are among the Centre's, and by implication science's, most effective public relations efforts because Wilson has long been known as a superlative speaker.
     "He could sell anybody anything," says Mattie Howitt. "I've told him many times that he should have been a used car salesman. He'd have made millions. He'd really have done something with his life."

     "like the ghosts of all the mice that ever were"

      (J. Tuzo Wilson claims that part of his success as a writer is having a superlative editor for a wife. He has been married to Isabel Dickson since 1938. He calls her the literary member of the family, says she writes an essay a day and edits most of his material. "Her style is more florid and literary than mine. We compromise a lot and generally end up with something in the middle." In the middle or otherwise, many an author, in and out of science, would give a great deal to write as well as he. Some examples):
      Just as study has demonstrated that in addition to being larger than the universe is also more regular than had been thought, so do other investigations uncover hidden meaning in the nature of all matter, energy, and life. Everywhere in science modern tools and ideas bring to light the elegant and orderly skeins by which nature builds the glory that we see about us, knit in regular patterns from simple stitches. Her apparently infinite materials are made of only a few million chemicals. These are not unrelated substances, but the compounds of one hundred and three elements. Even the elements are not distinct; each consists of electrons, protons, neutrons, and energy arranged in a special pattern. The colours that we see in such myriad shades are but electro-magnetic vibrations of varying wave-lengths. Indeed, we may think of all nature in terms of music, as infinitely ingenious and elaborate variations on a few simple themes. - IGY, The Year of The New Moons.

      Although our family never had much money, mother in particular behaved exactly as though we did and, indeed, we enjoyed many of the benefits of wealth without its debilitating effects. Thus I grew up expecting to travel, taking a good education for granted, and being used to meeting people and having lots of books. We lived in a large old house on the outskirts of Ottawa surrounded by two acres of woods and a garden in which the family grew much of its food. From an early age I hoed and weeded vegetables, tended chickens, and picked fruit. We were also expected to study hard, and to walk four miles a day to get to school and back. On weekends we swam, paddled and skied. Later, this upbringing made geological field work seem natural and not a labor.
      Since both my parents had their own education cut short, they were determined that their children should fare better and as a consequence in 1913 mother brought back a friend from England who acted as a governess to myself and my sister. I have always felt that this early start was of great benefit to me although scarcely in the manner intended. As the youngest and smallest in my class, I sailed through school at its head. This did not make me popular. Because I was out of my own age group, I was forced at the private school to play games with older and larger boys. Thus I came to dislike all team sports and this has since saved me a great deal of time. - Early Days in University Geophysics

      ... I was alone on the ice cap. In every direction lay the plain, the greatest and most truly lifeless desert on earth. A white nothing, you say? No, rather a scene of infinite variety in soft and ever-changing pastel tones. When the sun was at its highest, its cold brilliance imparted a lustre to the snow, which was broken only by the drifting shadows of the clouds. Later, when the sun dropped lower during the night hours, the shadows lengthened and their deep blue contrasted richly with the yellow tones of the sun in the south. The clouds wore halos and brooded darkly against the northern sky.
      When we think of snow, we think of a soft blanket falling in a silent winter night, of crystal stars on gloves, of shadowy flakes around street lamps, of shoveling the soft and feathery whiteness off the path in the morning. Snow in the Antarctic is not like that. It is the foundation of everything. From one's feet to the horizon there is a flat but furrowed plain of white, so hard that one can walk anywhere on its wind-blown surface, so rough and corrugated that one trips on its jagged crests and stumbles into its deep hollows and around the obstructions. Across it whips the undying wind and wisps of driven snow grains are ever running past on their way over the great ice, like the ghosts of all the mice that ever were, parting around one's boots or leaping into the air behind a lifeless tractor. - IGY, The Year of The New Moons

      The highest point of my (thesis) area, Mount Hague, in the Beartooth Mountains, was rather inaccessible but I reached it by walking, climbing, and running for the best part of three days and sleeping at night by a fire. I was rewarded by finding that the top of Mount Hague was a flat area. This I found surprising, and the discovery later influenced my ideas that North America had overridden and had been uplifted by the East Pacific Rise. I had been taught that mountains were usually pointed, and that flat areas were only produced by prolonged erosion down to sea level, and hence I thought that Mount Hague must have been fairly recently uplifted 12,000 feet. The top was also completely undisturbed which supported the view of the local dude ranchers that it had never been climbed before. One of them was so pleased when I arrived back at his ranch dripping wet from swimming across the Stillwater River that he arranged for me to visit a remote but excellent fishing camp of a friend. To do this I had to learn
     to ride. This was accomplished in the simplest possible way by mounting me one morning at seven o'clock on a docile mare with instructions to follow a trail for 25 miles and to remember to get off and pull the horse over a 9000 foot pass. In spite of a snow flurry, I managed to pick up the trail on the other side and I believe I enjoyed the trip more than the horse and was in better shape at the end of it. - Early Days in University Geophysics

      When I graduated in 1930 I could claim that I had by accident become the first to graduate in Canada in a course designed to train geophysicists. Of course there were practicing geophysicists already, but they had picked up their expertise on the job. In total there was, so far as I knew, one man who measured gravity, one or perhaps two seismologists, four or five people studying the earth's magnetic field, two physical oceanographers, a few meteorologists and geodetic surveyors and a rapidly increasing number of geophysical prospectors, some very able and some complete mountebanks. - Movements in Earth Science

      The two years I spend in allegedly studying geophysics in Cambridge passed before the department of Geodesy and Geophysics at Madingley Rise existed. Fifty years later I chanced to be in Cambridge when another statute came to the vote and I was able as a graduate to go to the Senate House and vote to unite geodesy and geophysics with the other earth-science departments. Thus I witnessed the whole span of (Edward) Bullard's reign at Madingley Rise where he built such a brilliant department. By his creative ability and by his custom of inviting colleagues from all over the world to spend their leave there he exerted a major influence on the development of the subject.
      He was witty, entertaining and a rebel. A photograph at the Scripps Institute shows a rear view of him seated on a boulder, clad in nothing but a large sombrero. I recall one chilly October evening when he was head of the Department of Physics at Toronto he persuaded a mixed party all to take a skinny-dip in a lake in northern Ontario. They did not linger. - Movements in Earth Science.