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[Phys-L] Re: Stories to share



Try "Eurekas and Euphorias, the Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes" =
by Walter Gratzer, who cites his sources. It covers all the sciences.=
Some stories sound like the ones we've heard, with little change. Ot=
hers add some interesting twists. The Roentgen story is a mix of the =
traditional tale with some added information. Frederick Smith (Oxford=
) and Philipp Lenard are mentioned as two who may have missed the dis=
covery. And Lenard's feet of clay are described in the last line of t=
he two page article. "He [Lemard] became a savage and intemperate opp=
onent of Albert Einstein and a passionate Nazi."=20

________________________________

=46rom: Forum for Physics Educators on behalf of Hugh Haskell
Sent: Sat 2/4/2006 10:26 PM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: Stories to share



At 20:33 -0600 2/4/06, Brian Whatcott wrote:

I take it that bc suggests there is a class of discovery that did=
not go
previously unheeded by others.

Indeed, there are lots of them, and they include some pretty
well-known people--ones who you wouldn't think would make that kind
of mistake.

Fermi is one of them. During his neutron bombardment experiments he
saw evidence of transuranic elements in his data--what he was looking
for, and so he reported it as such. But he didn't have the benefit of
a chemical analysis to verify his results, and so, when Ida Noddack
wrote that she thought what Fermi had seen was what later came to be
known as fission, Fermi dismissed her claim and nobody else paid any
attention to it. So the coast was clear for Hahn, Meitner and Frisch
to make that discovery.

The Joliot-Curies are another. They were in the thick of the
investigations that led to six Nobels in the 30s and early 40s: the
neutron, the positron, deuterium, artificial radioactivity,
transuranic elements and fission itself. They got one out of six.
Probably not a bad average at that level of science, but there is
evidence that they actually saw positrons and neutrons before the
credited discoverers but misinterpreted their results and so missed
out on those momentous discoveries.

I forget where I read that an American physicist, whose name I don't
recall saw the effects of x-rays in his lab at Johns-Hopkins but
discarded the plates as flawed, several years before Roentgen got his
results.

And Tony Rothman claims, in one of his recent books, that
radioactivity was first seen in the 1860s, but the results were not
publicized, and that Becquerel worked to suppress that information
when he made his discovery. Rothman also claims that Becquerel knew
about the earlier results and that this knowledge guided him in his
work. I haven't read the claims Rothman has made, so I can't be sure
of all the details, or know whether his assertion is credible, but
it's out there. I think he has an essay on the subject on his web
site.

Someone has written that discovery involves looking at what everyone
else has looked at but seeing something different. If that's true, I
would guess that stories like the above are the rule rather than the
exception.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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