On this day, 113 years ago, on January 6, 1912 (November 18, 1911, the lunar calendar),"layman" Wigner proposed the "theory of continental drift." One day in the spring of 1910, Alfred Wigner (1880 - 1930), lying in his hospital bed, accidentally glanced at the world map hanging on the opposite wall and noticed a strange phenomenon that he had never thought about in ordinary days: On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean-the west coasts of Europe and Africa are far away from the east coasts of North South America, and their outlines actually have great correspondence. In particular, the right-angled protrusion at the eastern end of Brazil is very consistent with the Gulf of Guinea, which is recessed into the continent on the west bank of Africa. If we could move the two continents closer together, they would be able to be inlaid together. The German meteorologist, who had just turned 30 years old, thought the coincidence was interesting at the time, but didn't think much about it. The following autumn, Wigner happened to see a sentence in a collection of papers and was very surprised: According to paleontological arguments, Brazil and Africa once had a land connection. Combined with his expedition experience in Greenland and other places, Wigner came up with a bold idea: the two continents were a whole early on, but only later separated by rupture and drift. Next, Wigner began to study this issue seriously and tried to collect geological data from various aspects to find evidence of sea-land drift. In many research projects, he found that the types of some fossils and rocks did not match the climate of these continents at the time. For example, fossils of many animals have been found on the island of Spibogen in the Arctic Ocean that used to live only in the tropics. If Spiebogen Island had not "drifted" to its current location, how would it have "caught up" with the tropical climate in the past? Another example is also surprising: a sedimentary ore called moraine was discovered in the Sahara Desert, but it is a strange deposit left behind by moving glaciers. On January 6, 1912, Wigner gave a speech entitled "The Origin of the Continent and the Ocean" at the Geological Society in Frankfurt, Germany, proposing the "theory of continental drift." Soon after, he was drafted into the army to fight in World War I and was hospitalized twice. During his recuperation, he was able to intensively and deeply think about and study the ideas and evidence of the "continental drift theory", and published the book "The Origin of Sea and Sea" in 1915. However, it was not until the English version of the third edition of this book was published in 1924 that the "continental drift theory" began to receive widespread attention from the academic community. In 1937, the Commercial Press released Mu Shaoliang's translation of "On the Movement of the Mainland" from a Japanese version, which was the earliest Chinese version of the book. It now appears that Wigner was the first scientist to publish a clear and logical theory of continental movement. The successor of his ideas, the theory of plate tectonics, is today regarded as the primary theory supporting the origin, structure and dynamics of the earth's continents. From the proposal of the theory of continental drift to the establishment of the theory of plate tectonics, it finally promoted a veritable great revolution in the field of earth science. However, Wigner's ideas that were ahead of the times were widely ridiculed, hostile and resisted at the time. They were ridiculed as "a beautiful dream, the dream of a great poet" and even criticized as "a completely damn stupid idea." At that time, Wigner proposed the theory of continental drift as a "meteorologist engaged in geological research", which inevitably aroused doubts among so-called "professionals", and his flaws in his interpretation of the dynamic mechanism of continental drift also left him a "handle" that was attacked. An authoritative figure at the time once concluded: "A layman who transplanted the facts he had from one discipline to another obviously would not get the right results." However, it was this "interdisciplinary approach" to use data and perspectives from other disciplines for research that made Wigner successful. In fact, Wigner provided the best evidence for the continental drift theory precisely from his work in the field of climate. Wigner's most fundamental and creative contribution was that he revealed for the first time the possibility of large-scale horizontal movement of the continent, which had a major impact on the dominant theory of land and sea fixation at that time; he also proposed for the first time the concept that the continent and the seabed were two special shells on the surface of the earth, which differed from each other in rock composition and altitude. Wigner was born in Berlin, the son of a preacher and director of an orphanage. When he was a child, his physique was weak and his endurance was poor, but he yearned for exploring the North Pole, so he consciously and even severely exercised his body. Due to his father's prevention, he failed to join the expedition after graduating from high school, but instead entered Humboldt University to study. In 1905, Wigner received a doctorate in astronomy, but at this time he was more interested in geophysics and meteorology, so he went to the Lindenburg Aviation Meteorological Observatory to conduct high-altitude meteorological research, and successively worked at the Hamburg Ocean Meteorological Observatory, University of Hamburg, University of Graz. Wigner's life ended tragically. At the end of April 1930, he arrived in Greenland for the fourth time and attempted to repeatedly measure Greenland's longitude in order to further demonstrate continental drift from a geodetic perspective. Unfortunately, he was hit by a powerful snowstorm the day after his 50th birthday and fell on the vast snowfield. His body was not discovered until April of the following year-frozen as stone, integrated with the glacier. "The Origin of Land and Sea", by Alfred Wigner, translated by Li Xudan, published by Peking University Press in November 2006