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Walter was a geologist specializing in paleomagnetism, Luis was a physicist and I was a nuclear chemist. And now here we were telling paleontologists that we had solved a problem that had eluded them for over a century. It's not terribly surprising that they didn't embrace it immediately." As Luis Alvarez joked: "We were caught practicing geology without a license."
沃爾特是地質學家，他的專長是古磁學；路易斯是物理學家；我是核化學家。現在我們卻在這里對古生物學家說，我們已經解決那個困擾了他們一個多世紀的難題。他們沒有馬上接受我們的看法，這是不足為奇的?！甭芬姿埂ぐ柾呃姿归_玩笑說：“我們沒有執照就在搞地質學，結果當場被人捉住了?！?/div>
But there was also something much deeper and more fundamentally abhorrent in the impact theory. The belief that terrestrial processes were gradual had been elemental in natural history since the time of Lyell. By the 1980s, catastrophism had been out of fashion for so long that it had become literally unthinkable. For most geologists the idea of a devastating impact was, as Eugene Shoemaker noted, "against their scientific religion."
但是，人們憎恨撞擊理論有著更深層次的原因。自萊爾時代以來，大家一直認為，地球上的過程是漸進的，這是自然史的一個基本要素。到20世紀80年代，災變說早已過時，實際上成了一種不可思議的理論。對大多數地質學家來說，關于破壞性極大的撞擊的見解，正如尤金·蘇梅克指出的，“違反了他們的科學教義”。
Nor did it help that Luis Alvarez was openly contemptuous of paleontologists and their contributions to scientific knowledge. "They're really not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors," he wrote in the New York Times in an article that stings yet.
路易斯·阿爾瓦雷斯公開蔑視古生物學家和他們對科學知識的貢獻，這也無濟于事。“他們根本就不是個好科學家，他們更像是集郵者。”他在《紐約時報》的一篇文章里寫道。這篇文章至今依然刺人。
Opponents of the Alvarez theory produced any number of alternative explanations for the iridium deposits—for instance, that they were generated by prolonged volcanic eruptions in India called the Deccan Traps—and above all insisted that there was no proof that the dinosaurs disappeared abruptly from the fossil record at the iridium boundary. One of the most vigorous opponents was Charles Officer of Dartmouth College.
阿爾瓦雷斯理論的反對者對銥的沉積提出了許多不同的解釋──比如，他們認為這是由印度源源不斷的火山噴出物產生的，即所謂的“德干暗色巖”(“暗色巖”是瑞典文，指一種熔巖；“德干”指今天的德干半島)，他們尤其堅持認為，根據銥界的化石記錄，沒有證據表明恐龍是突然消失的。達特茅斯學院的查爾斯·奧菲瑟是態度最堅決的反對者之一。
