Dean Chapman's Contributions to Tektite Science

Dean Roden Chapman (1922-1995), an engineer and scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, was one of the founders of astronautics (rocket science). He used his laboratory to produce objects that are very similar to Australian tektites. There were two major questions about tektites in his day: did they come for the Earth or the Moon? And were they caused by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions? Chapman came to believe that tektites were caused by meteor impacts on the Moon. He made many contributions to our understanding of tektites and was also one of the people who helped NASA get to the Moon. One percent of the Moon was covered with little glass spheres, but they are quite different from the tektites known on the Earth. The data from the Moon rocks was largely incompatible with the theory that terrestrial tektites are derived from the Moon. Chapman stopped publishing papers about tektites, but he remained interested in the subject for the rest of his life and believed that in the long run the lunar impact theory might become dominant again as new data was returned from the Moon. From our present understanding of tektites and the Moon, Chapman failed because he privileged the facts that he generated himself in his laboratory. He was not prepared to study the messy complexity of natural products. He was misled by the meteorite science traditions used in tektite science. He did not use appropriate statistical procedures, and because he was such a famous scientist in his own field the editors of two major journals in which he published did not properly assist him when he was working outside his area of major competence.