Today, we ask if there was life before Clovis. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. S cientists are always at their worst when they're most certain.
Science looks the way it's supposed to look only when it faces mystery.
When Dirac and de Broglie struggled with particles and waves in the 1920s, that was real combat with mystery. It was just then, in the '20s, that another piece of common wisdom began falling apart. In 1920, we believed the age of human life in the Americas was only a few thousand years. Then, in 1926, we found remains at a site near Clovis, New Mexico. Anthropology riveted our interest as the age of the first Americans suddenly stretched to 12,000 years.