Super Scientists Unite

For one of my classes I had to write a paper answering some questions based on an article we read.
This is the information of the article I had to read:
England, P., 2007, John Perry's neglected critique of Kelvin's age for the Earth: A missed opportunity in geodynamics: Geological Society of America Today, v. 17, no.1, p. 4-9.

This is a slightly shortened version of my paper:

The age of the earth has been a controversial issue ever since people started guessing or calculating it. At times this has been a religious controversy but at other times it was a controversy between scientific disciplines. This was the case during the late 1800s. Lord Kelvin was an esteemed physicist even being called “the highest authority in science now living” by his contemporary, Mark Twain. Unfortunately, however he was not a geologist. Thus, when he and his associate, John Perry, came up with an age that was far too short from a geological perspective, they were widely criticized or ignored. Ultimately, this stunted geologic theory well into the 20^th century.

In order to calculate the age of the earth Lord Kelvin used a simplified model of the earth. He based his model and calculations on three assumptions: (1) energy is conserved (2) the interior of the earth is a homogenous solid, and (3) all heat sources for the planet were known. Unfortunately, the second and third assumptions were inaccurate. The interior of the earth is neither homogenous nor does it act like a solid. Also, there was another important source of heat that was unknown at that time. Although John Perry did not have all the answers he suspected that the assumptions made by his former mentor were incorrect, not his math. Surprisingly enough, it was not these assumptions that Lord Kelvin was criticized for. Instead, it was his simplified model and calculations that were attacked by geologists and others. Geologists believed that the earth and uniformitarian processes were far too complex to be accounted for by a model. Physicists, after all, are known for simplifying problems. According to Kelvin one geologist, Andrew Ramsey, even said that the two of them might as well agree to disagree because each of their fields was far too complex for the other to understand. If however, these two highly intelligent men would have been willing to try to share their specific knowledge, then perhaps in their collaboration they would have learned the strengths in each others arguments and the weaknesses in their own. Unfortunately this did not occur.

Coming from a background of two disciplines myself, I am often surprised and disturbed at the lack of communication and respect between disciplines, sometimes even similar scientific disciplines. Too often different disciplines apparently relearn the same material, sometimes even coining new words that mean the same thing, or using the same word to mean the opposite thing. This makes communication almost impossible. There should be more of a focus on cross-disciplinary teams who can look at the same problem from different perspectives. Then, when there is a problem like Lord Kelvin's impossibly short age of the earth the true inconsistencies and failures can be found instead of just believing that because the science came from another discipline it must have been done in ignorance.