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Standing by the Science

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

This post is about a variety of attitudes that some well known scientists have taken to the discoveries they have made. These attitudes range from wishywashiness to extreme confidence. The examples have been chosen at random, so please do not be offended if your favorite stories have not been included (I would be happy to be informed of them). Also, I will not discuss the reasons for the responses given by the scientists in every case. That's a bigger task than I have time and space for.


We will start with Einstein, who will in fact provide another story. The first one is about his prediction of the deflection of light by a gravitational field. After Eddington (more of him later, too) had confirmed the effect, Einstein was asked how he would have felt if experiment had contradicted his theory. He famously said he would have felt sorry for the Lord, since (he believed) the theory was correct. Not exactly short on confidence, was he?


Next: Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, found in his studies that there was a critical mass, above which stars evolved into neutron stars or black holes and below which they became white dwarfs. This idea was opposed and ridiculed by Eddington, who believed all stars eventually became white dwarfs. Chandra was young at that time (about 24 years of age) and relatively unknown, while Eddington was older (about 52), and famous after his confirmation of Einstein's theory. The two scientists maintained friendly relations, but rather than fight the opposition to the end, Chandra wrote his results up in a book and changed his field to another topic in astrophysics. Eddington passed away in 1944 and in 1983 Chandra was recognized with a Nobel prize in physics. By then his theory was well confirmed by experiment.


Now comes Brian Josephson, who received the Nobel prize for physics for predicting the behavior of supercurrents in the presence of a tunneling barrier. His original prediction was initially met with strenuous - but polite - opposition from John Bardeen (the account provided here is quite amusing), one of the original pioneers of the theory of superconductivity, and the only person in history to receive two Nobel prizes in physics. This was substantial resistance (sic), but Josephson persisted with his claims. Experiments eventually showed Bardeen to be wrong and he graciously withdrew his objections.


Next we have Daniel Schechtman, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2011 for the discovery of quasicrystals (structures that are ordered, but not periodic). His original observations were not believed to be correct and he had to leave his research group as well as face opposition and ridicule from scientists as prominent as Linus Pauling (Pauling said there were no such things as quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists - ouch!). Schechtman persisted, went through a roller-coaster ride trying to get his results published, and was eventually proved to be correct.


Einstein again. This time the prediction in question was that of gravitational waves. Although they came out of the mathematics of his theory of general relativity, Einstein went back and forth between positing their existence and denying it. You can find quotes from him to this effect here. Gravitational waves were finally detected in 2016.

Murray Gell-Mann famously made sense of particle physics by introducing the notion of quarks. But for a long while he referred to them as mathematical conveniences rather than as real particles (among other things they seemed to imply the existence of fractional electric charge). The physical existence of quarks was eventually experimentally established.


That's all for now, but I have a feeling I missed some of the other juicy stories...







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