{"id":205,"date":"2006-04-21T16:11:06","date_gmt":"2006-04-21T16:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/21\/most-shafted-physicist-a-biase\/"},"modified":"2006-04-21T16:11:06","modified_gmt":"2006-04-21T16:11:06","slug":"most-shafted-physicist-a-biase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/21\/most-shafted-physicist-a-biase\/","title":{"rendered":"Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the <cite>Seed<\/cite> editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/seed\/2006\/04\/shaft_can_you_dig_it.php\">who&#8217;s the most overlooked scientist<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?<\/li>\n<li>Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s a little ironic that I can point to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.findarticles.com\/p\/articles\/mi_m1511\/is_7_20\/ai_55030837\">nice magazine profle<\/a> of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation\">cosmic microwave background radiation<\/a>, and shared the Nobel in 1978, but Alpher is a footnote. He deserves better than a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ralph_Alpher\">stub of a Wikipedia article<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8211; classic textbooks) on one of my shelves. I&#8217;ve met him a few times, and he&#8217;s an interesting guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who&#8217;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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/21\/most-shafted-physicist-a-biase\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}