In 2019, Physics Today published a page-and-half essay titled “A Renaming Proposal: ‘The Auger–Meitner Effect.’” The authors (who include a science historian) claimed that Lise Meitner, a famous Austrian-born nuclear physicist, was the first to describe the nature of secondary electrons in the nuclear decay process, which—as we now understand—have a similar nature to the secondary electrons emitted following an X-ray excitation of atoms or molecules.
Thank you, Anna. We need knowledgeable retrospectives like this.
Errors in the history of science often work the other way: one scientist, usually at a prominent institution, becomes associated with a great discovery, even though someone else made the fundamental breakthrough.
One example is the expansion of the universe. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and cosmologist, published the relationship between galaxy distance and recession speed in 1927—two years before Hubble’s famous paper. Yet the discovery is still often attributed primarily to Hubble.
This is a very nice discussion of the provenance of an idea, outlining the controversies involved.
I love learning about the histories of these ideas. I devoted the first 100 pages of my PhD thesis to a historical introduction to the narrow subfield that the thesis topic fell into. The total thesis length was about 200 pages.
Later I distributed numerous copies of my thesis to friends and colleagues. Some read it, but most did not.
A number of people told me they had read my thesis. I asked them all, how far did you get?
Almost every single person stopped reading after 100 pages, the historical introduction. Almost no one went farther into the new material and new developments. It was amazing to me.
I guess they found it too challenging, and gave up. I was quite surprised.
As my career has unfolded, and I have built considerably on this initial work, I have created far more powerful methods and techniques. Everyone asks me, "Aren't you afraid of getting scooped?"
Not that afraid. I know of several people who worked on the same problems I worked on. And all they produced was something akin to a "dog's breakfast", as the expression goes. Several of these are researchers of some prominence and renown. I guess they are not quite as good as they advertise.
I just keep working. I know if and when these results are released, it will cause immense disruption.
Sorry about that. Everyone should have paid attention to me before.
Thanks for the reference to the Duparc article. In graduate school in the 1980s, I worked (unsuccessfully) on the Auger effect. I was using fern spores in my experiment, and a physicist friend of mine wanted to see if he could use my spores to test whether x-rays hitting potassium and releasing locaized energy by way of the Auger effect would inhibit mitosis (as a model to fight cancer). We had limited time to use the beam at Brookhaven and unfortunately within that time period the ways that I tried to mount the cells so they could be irradiated in a dried state used tape that had solvents that killed the cells.
I agree with Anna on this. It is important that truth prevail in science, including how we relate the history of science. Meitner's accomplishments should neither be diminished by ignoring her work or failing to acknowledge the unjust barriers she (like many others) faced, nor by ascribing to her accomplishments that were not her own. Sadly, feminists in many scientific societies have made a habit of elevating the accomplishments of preferred demographic groups far above what they actually warrant. Former President Robbie Gries of GSA (Geological Society of America) was a strong proponent of this approach, insisting that we should know the names of these "remarkable" women. Is it important to know the name of the first woman to work as an oil driller when no one knows the names of the thousands of men who did the same work before her?
Gries et al similarly celebrate the trio of women geoscientists who worked out the correlation fossils for understanding the dating of sedimentary rocks when they worked as paleontologists during World War II...but were outraged when the men returned to their jobs and displaced the women after the war. How they square this "injustice" of men returning to their jobs after being drafted to fight in a war with their demand that women's jobs be protected when women CHOOSE to go on maternity leave is never explained.
Someone is pestering the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) to name the unit of linear momentum after Emily Noether, because... woman! There has been a letter about it in the American Journal of Physics,
I don't mind the concept, but it is so poorly thought out, a bunch of feminists and virtue signalling panty-panderers are all excited about it, and no-one dare speak out against it. There is even a change.org petition to lobby NIST I think (although that is a US body, not international).
So they want to report momentum in mNoe or MNoe ("That's a mega-Noe to you buddy!).
In the meantime, Ns (Newton seconds) works just fine. It's just disappointing that any sensible debate is almost impossible.
Thank you, Anna. We need knowledgeable retrospectives like this.
Errors in the history of science often work the other way: one scientist, usually at a prominent institution, becomes associated with a great discovery, even though someone else made the fundamental breakthrough.
One example is the expansion of the universe. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and cosmologist, published the relationship between galaxy distance and recession speed in 1927—two years before Hubble’s famous paper. Yet the discovery is still often attributed primarily to Hubble.
That and other historical realities of cosmology are described here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00218286251336389
This is a very nice discussion of the provenance of an idea, outlining the controversies involved.
I love learning about the histories of these ideas. I devoted the first 100 pages of my PhD thesis to a historical introduction to the narrow subfield that the thesis topic fell into. The total thesis length was about 200 pages.
Later I distributed numerous copies of my thesis to friends and colleagues. Some read it, but most did not.
A number of people told me they had read my thesis. I asked them all, how far did you get?
Almost every single person stopped reading after 100 pages, the historical introduction. Almost no one went farther into the new material and new developments. It was amazing to me.
I guess they found it too challenging, and gave up. I was quite surprised.
As my career has unfolded, and I have built considerably on this initial work, I have created far more powerful methods and techniques. Everyone asks me, "Aren't you afraid of getting scooped?"
Not that afraid. I know of several people who worked on the same problems I worked on. And all they produced was something akin to a "dog's breakfast", as the expression goes. Several of these are researchers of some prominence and renown. I guess they are not quite as good as they advertise.
I just keep working. I know if and when these results are released, it will cause immense disruption.
Sorry about that. Everyone should have paid attention to me before.
Dear Anna,
Thanks for the reference to the Duparc article. In graduate school in the 1980s, I worked (unsuccessfully) on the Auger effect. I was using fern spores in my experiment, and a physicist friend of mine wanted to see if he could use my spores to test whether x-rays hitting potassium and releasing locaized energy by way of the Auger effect would inhibit mitosis (as a model to fight cancer). We had limited time to use the beam at Brookhaven and unfortunately within that time period the ways that I tried to mount the cells so they could be irradiated in a dried state used tape that had solvents that killed the cells.
thanks,
randy
I agree with Anna on this. It is important that truth prevail in science, including how we relate the history of science. Meitner's accomplishments should neither be diminished by ignoring her work or failing to acknowledge the unjust barriers she (like many others) faced, nor by ascribing to her accomplishments that were not her own. Sadly, feminists in many scientific societies have made a habit of elevating the accomplishments of preferred demographic groups far above what they actually warrant. Former President Robbie Gries of GSA (Geological Society of America) was a strong proponent of this approach, insisting that we should know the names of these "remarkable" women. Is it important to know the name of the first woman to work as an oil driller when no one knows the names of the thousands of men who did the same work before her?
Gries et al similarly celebrate the trio of women geoscientists who worked out the correlation fossils for understanding the dating of sedimentary rocks when they worked as paleontologists during World War II...but were outraged when the men returned to their jobs and displaced the women after the war. How they square this "injustice" of men returning to their jobs after being drafted to fight in a war with their demand that women's jobs be protected when women CHOOSE to go on maternity leave is never explained.
Thanks for helping to keep the record straight!
Someone is pestering the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) to name the unit of linear momentum after Emily Noether, because... woman! There has been a letter about it in the American Journal of Physics,
https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/92/9/647/3309134/It-is-time-to-honor-Emmy-Noether-with-a-momentum
I don't mind the concept, but it is so poorly thought out, a bunch of feminists and virtue signalling panty-panderers are all excited about it, and no-one dare speak out against it. There is even a change.org petition to lobby NIST I think (although that is a US body, not international).
So they want to report momentum in mNoe or MNoe ("That's a mega-Noe to you buddy!).
In the meantime, Ns (Newton seconds) works just fine. It's just disappointing that any sensible debate is almost impossible.