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[Phys-L] Re: Stories to share



Very good -- we are taught the other kind (Ceylonitous), e.g. Becquerel,
Roentgen, quinine, etc. This will impress upon students to follow up
the unexpected.

bc



Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

Responding to a message on another list yesterday, I wrote (in part):




. . . That reminded me of a story I was told in France, when I was a
graduate student in Orsay. As most of you know, Frederic Joliot
Curie and his wife, Irene, discovered artificial radioactivity and
shared Nobel Prize for it. At that time a small cyclotron was already
used in Berkeley. Those who worked with the cyclotron knew that
Geiger counters located near objects hit by the beam often
continued counting for a while after the beam was turned off. But
they did not think that this was worth announcing as a big discovery.
It was accepted as a trivial fact. . . .



To which Brian Josephson, another Nobel Laureate, replied:



And once upon a time one Ivar Giaver, investigating superconducting
tunnel junctions, noticed that occasionally there was a zero voltage
current, which he assumed was due to a short circuiit across the
barrier as it often is. He also noticed the sensitivity of this
current
sometimes to magnetic fields, but assumed that this was just
some quirk of the apparatus ...



I did not know about Giaver's missing a chance of being recognized as a
discoverer of an interesting physical phenomenon. In any case, stories
like these should be known to students. That is why I am sharing them
here. Any more illustrations of that kind?

Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.




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