On 04/05/2016 01:52 AM, Savinainen Antti asked about a
particular article that is about 98% nonsense, and not
worth discussing by itself.
Other articles from the same source include
"The new astrology"
"Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer?"
"Is the cold fusion egg about to hatch?"
Here's what goes through my mind when I see stuff like
that: http://xkcd.com/386/
HOWEVER this provides the opportunity to discuss the
often-underappreciated fact that science is a team sport,
and more-or-less always has been. Progress is incremental
and non-monotonic.
Misattribution can run both ways:
a) A famous figure can get credit for things he didn't
do alone, or didn't do at all;
b) A famous figure can get no credit for things he
actually did do.
However, (a) is overwhelmingly more common that (b), and
indeed (a) is often the explanation for (b), e.g. when
Newton or Einstein gets credit for something Galileo did.
A recent example is the "Imitation Game" movie which showed
Alan Turing breaking the Enigma single-handedly, overcoming
opposition from cartoonishly stupid peers and management. It's
just nonsense. Turing did in fact make epochal contributions,
but so did a lot of other people. Turing respected his
colleagues, and they respected him. It was a huge team effort.
The practice of explaining events in terms of personalities
is held in contempt by serious historians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
Nevertheless, it has a strong allure to people who haven't
thought carefully about it.
In politics, there are mechanisms for concentrating decision-
making power in the hands of one person. This has significant
advantages, and more than a few disadvantages.
A few years back I was at a political meeting that celebrated
the joint bicentennial birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles
Darwin (12 Feb 1809). The politicians could not understand --
and mostly refused to believe -- that scientists did not venerate
Darwin in the same way that politicians venerate Lincoln. Every
time I mentioned "evolution" they translated it to "Darwin's
theory of evolution". I tried to explain that evolution had been
going on for millions of years, and even if Darwin hadn't come
along somebody would have figured it out sooner or later, and
our understanding of evolution had improved over the last 200
years ... but they weren't buying it. They "knew" that Darwin
was the whole story. They couldn't imagine it any other way.
Wallace, Schmallace.
I quoted Lincoln himself: "I claim not to have controlled events,
but confess plainly that events have controlled me." But they
still weren't buying it.
There is a *lot* of misattribution:
*) Lyon Playfair did not invent the Playfair cipher.
Charles Wheatstone did.
*) On the other hand, Wheatstone did not invent the
Wheatstone bridge.
*) The first law of motion was set forth quite clearly
by Galileo, many decades before Newton came along.
*) The principle of relativity was set forth quite clearly
by Galileo, more than 250 years before Einstein came along.
*) The four-dimensional spacetime continuum didn't come
from Einstein, but rather from Minkowski.
*) et cetera.......
As Thomas Kuhn and others have pointed out, most of the "history"
you read about in textbooks and in the popular literature is garbage.
The famous guys deserve to be remembered for what they actually
contributed: Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing, and all
the rest. Arguing about whether Galileo's contribution was
immense ÷ 2 or immense × 2 is pointless.
By the same token, it doesn't help to give them credit for
things they didn't do alone, or didn't do at all. They don't
need the help.
More importantly, it is unwise and outright destructive to deny
credit to the other contributors. This is not an abstract point
about style or about history; this is important to all of us,
now and forever.
Here's one place where the rubber meets the road: It's hard to
put together a team if people think the most-famous member of the
team is going to get all the credit. This decreases the productivity
of everybody, big shots and small shots alike. I have personally
seen this problem from all angles, when I was the junior guy, when
I was the senior guy, and when I wasn't part of the team at all,
but rather a manager trying to put a team together.
Here's another place where the rubber meets the road: Misattribution
gives students grossly wrong ideas about the process of doing science.
It makes them think that science is ultra-easy if you're as smart as
Einstein and ultra-hard otherwise -- which is wrong twice over.
The Nobel Prize system reinforces the wrong ideas, insofar as
it is perceived to reward "the" guy who made "the" discovery.
Oddly enough, it seems that the movie industry is smarter than the
scientific community, insofar as they have awards for best supporting
actor, best hair&makeup, best sound editing, etc. -- not just one
big award.
Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants. That's
absolutely true, but even that's not the whole story. Not all
contributions provide a foundation or a "shoulder" in preparation
for some final brilliant synthesis. A lot of what Einstein did
was quite clever, but some of it was incomplete, clumsy, and/or
outright wrong -- so there was plenty of opportunity to come along
afterwards and make improvements, small and large (Minkowski,
Glauber, Bell, et cetera).
Specific constructive suggestion: If you're the big cheese, you
do not need to be first author. Consider the example of Bob
Richardson:
DD Osheroff, RC Richardson, DM Lee
FB Rasmussen, RA Buhrman, RC Richardson
DD Osheroff, WJ Gully, RC Richardson, DM Lee
DD Osheroff, DM Lee, RC Richardson
MR Freeman, RS Germain, RC Richardson
RA Guyer, RC Richardson, LI Zane
FB Rasmussen, CN Archie, RC Richardson
GE Watson, JD Reppy, RC Richardson
DT Lawson, WJ Gully, S Goldstein, RC Richardson
PC Hammel, RC Richardson
etc. etc. etc.
The following is not an exception, because it is from the days
when RCR himself was a grad student:
RC Richardson, E Hunt, H Meyer
As I see it, if you insist on being the first author, you make
it /look/ like you've accomplished more, because all the work
gets cited as Richardson et al. However, if let the smaller
cheeses go first, you /actually/ accomplish more, because it's
better for teamwork.
Bottom line:
Please, tell everybody (including students) that you don't need
to be Einstein to make important contributions. Science is a
team sport. Progress is incremental and non-monotonic.