The dedication reads, "Dedicated to the memory of Sir Harold Jeffreys, who saw the truth and preserved it." It is only through an appendix to the third edition of Jeffreys' book Scientific Inference that we know about Mary Cartwright's method of proving that the number is irrational. Opposition to continental drift and plate tectonics Like most of his contemporaries, Jeffreys was a strong opponent of continental drift as proposed by Alfred Wegener, Arthur Holmes, and even into the 1960s his Cambridge contemporaries. For him, continental drift was "out of the question" because no force even remotely strong enough to move the continents across the Earth's surface was evident. As geological and geophysical evidence for continental drift and plate tectonics mounted in the 1960s and after, to the point where it became the unifying concept of modern geology, Jeffreys remained a stubborn opponent of the theory to his death. Honours and awards Fellow, Royal Society, 1925 Adams Prize, 1927 (Constitution of the Earth) Gold Medal, Royal Astronomical Society, 1937 Buchan Prize, Royal Meteorological Society, 1929 Murchison Medal of Geological Society (Great Britain) 1939 Victoria Medal, Royal Geographical Society, 1941 Charles Lagrange Prize, Brussels Academy, 1948 Royal Medal, 1948 William Bowie Medal, American Geophysical Union, 1952 Knighted, 1953 Copley Medal, Royal Society, 1961 Vetlesen Prize, 1962 Bibliography 1924: The Earth, Its Origin, History and Physical Constitution, Cambridge University Press; 5th edn. 1970; 6th edn. 1976 1927: Operational Methods in Mathematical Physics, Cambridge University Press via Internet Archive, Review: 1929: The Future of the Earth, Norton & Company 1931: Scientific Inference, Macmillan Publishers; 2nd edn. 1937; 3rd edn. 1973 1931: Cartesian Tensors. Cambridge University Press; 2nd edn. 1961 1934: Ocean Waves and Kindred Geophysical Phenomena, with Vaughan Cornish, Cambridge University Press 1935: Earthquakes and Mountains, Methuen Publishing; 2nd edn. 1950 1939: Theory of Probability, Clarendon Press, Oxford; 2nd edn. 1948; 3rd edn. 1961 1946: Methods of Mathematical Physics, with Bertha S. Jeffreys. Cambridge University Press; 2nd edn. 1950; 3rd edn. 1956; corrected 3rd edn. 1966 1962: Asymptotic Approximations, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1963: Nutation and Forced Motion of the Earth's Pole from the Data of Latitude Observations, Macmillan 1971–77: Collected Papers of Sir Harold Jeffreys on Geophysics and Other Sciences, Gordon and Breach References Further reading (A review of Jeffreys' approach to probability; includes remarks on R.A. Fisher, Frank P. Ramsey, and Bruno de Finetti. External links Photographs of Harold Jeffreys at Emilio Segrè