Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who’s the most overlooked scientist:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
- Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
- Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?
It’s a little ironic that I can point to a nice magazine profle of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should’ve left an echo in the form of an all-pervading radiation field, and even estimated the temperature to be around 4K. Penzias and Wilson get credit for the eventual discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and shared the Nobel in 1978, but Alpher is a footnote. He deserves better than a stub of a Wikipedia article.
Full disclosure: Ralph was associated with the Physics and Astronomy department at Union College for many years, and still nominally had an office on campus until a couple of years ago. In fact, it was the office next to mine, and I have a big stack of his books (Morse and Feshbach, Born and Wolf, Mott and Massey– classic textbooks) on one of my shelves. I’ve met him a few times, and he’s an interesting guy.
If you want to talk astrophysics, Jocelyn Bell should have shared the Nobel Prize with Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. Of course, she has been widely recognized.
As for today: the rank & file. Tremendous amounts of progress is made in small steps by a large number of unrecognized people. Everybody knows the names “Stephen Hawking” and “Brian Greene,” but the progres we make in Physics is done by a lot more than those two. Even within Physics, consider a large particle physics experiment: hundreds of people are on the papers, and probably tens of those people were really crucial to it, but generally the spokesperson of the experiment is the only one you hear of.
If you read “The Runaway Universe” by Donald Goldsmith, you get the idea that there are really only one or two important people in one of the two collaborations. Yes, Saul Perlmutter is important and the leader, but there very key contributions and efforts made by other people (full disclosure: including myself) without which the SCP’s results wouldn’t have happened… yet they aren’t even mentioned in passing in the book.
We like our lone heroes. But there are many unrecognized heroes in Physics today. *That* is what I would point to as the most shafted physicists. By identifying just *one* “most” shafted physicst, it just feeds the problem.
-Rob
I did my dissertation on the microwave background in the late 60’s and the story then was that Alpher was lead author just to make the very neat alphabetic pun: Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow, in the 1948 paper that raised the concept to begin with. He certainly deserves more recognition. 4K was pretty close. I got 2.73K. Cosmic warming anyone?
Bethe was added to make the pun, I thought.
Bethe was added to make the pun. Gamow was Alpher’s thesis advisor, and had a weird sense of humor.
From Simon Singh’s Big Bang, p. 322:
If you read Gamows popular books (about “Mr Tompkins” explorations in the world of physics) I think you will find that he had a great sense of humor. Wikipedia says “impish” which might be true – I have forgotten the sense, but not the amount of it.
A typical answer in the USA-internet that I find very amusing is “N. Tesla”. Yes, I say, as Watt, Joule, Ampere or Volta, people whose names we have forgotten. Nor to speak of the financial unability during his live, raising for himself projects that nowadays need a whole team of physicist.
Lev Landau’s work is almost completely unknown to American physicists. Russians know him as the father of fluid dynamics, among many other things.
Not only the physicists who studied (and study) it, but the physics of plasma fluid flow itself is almost entirely unknown to most American physicists. Many have studied a mathematically elegant, but experimentally almost meaningless substitute for it called magnetohydrodynamics. This makes it hard for them to recognize plasma fluid phenomena when they encounter it. The result is frequently comical, lately e.g. explanations of water “geysers” on Enceladus.
If you read Gamows popular books (about “Mr Tompkins” explorations in the world of physics) I think you will find that he had a great sense of humor. Wikipedia says “impish” which might be true – I have forgotten the sense, but not the amount of it.
Oh, I don’t doubt I would’ve enjoyed his sense of humor. “Impish” is a good word for someone who would add an author to a paper just for the sake of a pun.
I get the sense that Ralph sometimes found it exasperating, though.
Lev Landau’s work is almost completely unknown to American physicists. Russians know him as the father of fluid dynamics, among many other things.
I know him as half of “Landau and Lifshitz,” one of the definitive textbooks out there.
Not only the physicists who studied (and study) it, but the physics of plasma fluid flow itself is almost entirely unknown to most American physicists. Many have studied a mathematically elegant, but experimentally almost meaningless substitute for it called magnetohydrodynamics.
Interesting.
About the only thing I know of magnetohydrodynamics is that I should head the other way in a hurry whenever it gets mentioned, as it invariably means that hideously complicated simulations are not far behind.
Nathan: Lev Landau’s work is almost completely unknown to American physicists.
Huh? Really? He made contributions to so many fields of physics that I find it hard to believe.
Chad: I know him as half of “Landau and Lifshitz,” one of the definitive textbooks out there.
It is said that “it does not contain even one word of Landau and even one thought of Lifshitz”.
Lev Landau’s work is almost completely unknown to American physicists
This is a patently ridiculous statement. A little googling reveals a particular axe that’s being ground, to wit:
(Word to the wise: astrophysicists, as a rule, study only a crippled form of plasma fluid dynamics, despite that — as they acknowledge — all of interplanetary and interstellar space is filled with tenuous plasma. Thus the steady stream of press releases invoking “dark matter” — lately imagined to constitute 99 times the visible universe’s mass; “supermassive black holes”; and “the Big Bang”. Don’t be surprised when the whole edifice collapses, in decade or five.)
” “The Big Bang” “? A word to the wise, indeed.
This is a difficult question to answer, because the right answer is almost certainly someone who got forgotten completely. But switching fields, the case that always gets me the most ticked off is Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer who <account type=”biased”>did all the hard work to establish the structural data on DNA that two other guys then finished the detail work on and rushed into print</account>.
It really is astonishing that Landau is unknown to American physicists. Mention him and they usually say, “Hmm, Landau levels, right?”.
And those press releases about “geysers” on Enceladus lofting collimated beams of water vapor hundreds of kilometers into space really are pretty comical, bias or no bias. Do you suppose those
fractures are carefully sculpted paraboloids?
Probably apocryphal story aboutn L&L. A very old Landau was giving a lecture and made, uncharacteristically and to the horror of the assembled, a mistake on the board.
Landau’s response was to sigh and say, “I know — I’m not Landau any more,” before returning to the board.
He then turned back around and remarked, “but I’m not Lifschitz yet.”
Frankly I doubt the story, but it’s good for a chuckle.
Nathan M-
Could you expand a little on your opinions re: this geyser business and your opinion of what’s going on with MHD? I’m interested in your perspective.
NL: via e-mail, if you like.
I hope this story about Landau is fake, it would be very rude of him to say such things about Lifschitz (but then, many people in science may be very rude).
Typical American physicist here. Doing a free association on “Landau”:
Well, there’s Landau levels, and there’s Landau theory for critical phenomena (developed for superconductivity, applied far more broadly, with his name), and there’s Landau damping for plasma waves. And my strongest association is with superfluidity, which I’m pretty sure was the reason he got the Nobel Prize.
Nathan, I think you’re simply wrong.
John Randall, British physicist.
During WWII, he developed a cavity magnetron powerful enough to make airborne radar practical. After the war, he began working on biophysics with Maurice Wilkins, and set up and directed the laboratory at King’s College London in which Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, mentioned above, did their work on DNA.
The cavity magnetron is also the basis of microwave ovens. So Randall made contributions to radar, DNA, and microwave cooking. If I could only figure out a way he contributed to the infrared remote control…
Ben: try asking around. He might have got rehabilitated some since Mermin’s “Boojums all the Way Through” in 1990, but those physicists I have quizzed in recent years sorted neatly into Americans who only recognized the name, and Europeans astonished that he could be so neglected. You might experience a different sampling.