Re: inertia of 'electron stuff'

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> At 06:59 PM 8/1/97, Brian Whatcott wrote:
> > This evokes a distant memory of the genesis of the Hall discovery.
> >
> >  If I recall, a research advisor threw out an offhand suggestion
> > as to transverse polarisation of current-carriers.
> >  Hall picked up and ran with the idea, so that his name is
> > immortalized, much to the consternation of folks in the vicinity...
> > (A sort of reverse Jocelyn Bell I suppose, who identified the first
> > pulsar as a research student, and whose director all but walked away
> > with the academic prize.)
>
> The "research advisor" in question was Henry Rowland, of Rensselaer and
> Johns-Hopkins fame, crafter of superb diffraction gratings.  He claimed to
> have suggested the work to Hall, and also to have been unsurprised at the
> result.

Anyone who would claim that Hall (whose first name I don't even know) is
more famous than H. A. Rowland had better spend some time reading history.
Rowland was the greatest scientist of his time, at least according to him.
(He was succeeded in this position by R. A. Millikan.) As far as eponymy
goes, surely you must have heard of Rowland's ring?

See http://www.cfm.brown.edu/crunch/society/Rowland.html

As far as Jocelyn Bell Burnell goes, she is famous, and Anthony Hewish,
her supervisor, is deservedly famous too, for his contributions to radio
astronomy. His Nobel Prize is apparently for the discovery of pulsars,
but that is not the real contribution that was recognized by the Nobel
committee. After all, Einstein received his for explaining Brownian
motion and the photoelectric effect, and Alvarez received his for the
omega minus discovery. These were scarcely their most important
contributions to physics.

Leigh