Physicists Getting Screwed*


Part I



An young Danish astronomer named Ole Roemer worked in Jean-Dominique Cassini's lab in the 1670's. Based on observations of Io's orbit around Jupiter, Roemer concluded that light had a finite speed of 298,000,000 meters per second (which is pretty close). Cassini thought this was ludicrous. Roemer challenged him - he predicted that Io would emerge around Jupiter at exactly 5:47 on November 9th, 1676, while Cassini predicted Io would emerge at 5:37. Roemer was of course correct, but Cassini was able to spread the news that he, Cassini, had predicted 5:47 and that Roemer had predicted 5:37. Thus, Roemer was discredited and his calculation of the speed of light was not recognized in his lifetime.


Michael Faraday was a completely uneducated and deeply religious young man, who worked as a lab assistant to then-prominent physicist Sir Humphrey Davy in the early 1800's. When Faraday discovered (and, with the help of Maxwell, went on to unify electricity and magnetism) that a magnetic field exerts a force along a wire carrying current, Sir Davy immediately propagated the lie that Faraday had usurped the discovery. Faraday was not able to continue with his research until Davy's death, 20 years later. Davy never recanted his statements.


Lise Meitner was a Jewish physicist in Germany in the first part of the 20th century. She established a close working relationship with the vastly less-talented Otto Hahn. She gave first authorship on several of her papers upon which he performed no work, including early formulations of the periodic table. In '30's, Hahn continued his professional relationship with Meitner but unexpectedly married an art student after an unusually brief courtship. He then turned Meitner over to the Nazis, forcing her to flee Germany. This gave him access to her experimental apparatus, although he was not able to understand the experiments. She directed the remainder of the experiment in exile, allowing Hahn to be the one to discover nuclear fission. He was, however, too stupid to recognize it, and theorists had to make the connection for him. Nevertheless, Hahn won the Nobel Prize and never mentioned Meitner in any literature. He became famous and rich and had element 105 named Hahnium, while she died in obscurity. In the late 80's, after a feminist push, element 109 was renamed Meitnerium, and in 1997, element 105 was renamed Dublium.


A professor of Einstein's refused to teach his undergraduates elementary electrodynamics. Because of this slight, Einstein addressed the professor only as Herr Weber, not Herr Professor Weber. In retaliation, the professor wrote terrible recommendation letters for Einstein. Albert was not able to get physics professorship or even a high school teaching job until after he formulated and published special relativity.







*SOURCE: Bodanis, B. A Biography